Top 19.3% reviewer
Only 95 users have written more helpful reviews.
Packages
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Bushy Leaves
Makes leaves render bushy instead of boxy.
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Mcl Lever Status Indicator
Makes levers in the “on” position have a red tip in MineClone2/MineClone5/Mineclonia
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Mcl Mushrooms 3D
Renders small mushrooms as 3D objects in MineClone2/MineClone5/Mineclonia
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Mcl Polished Stone Stairs
Adds polished stone stairs to MineClone2/MineClone5/Mineclonia
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Mcl Quick Harvest & Replant
Harvest and replant crops with one right-click in MineClone2/MineClone5/Mineclonia
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Studs
Adds studs on top of many nodes that are not ground content. This makes the decorated nodes look like interlocking bricks, similar to LEGO.
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TGA Encoder
A TGA Encoder written in Lua without the use of external Libraries.
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Xmaps
Adds map items that show terrain in HUD
Nice game, but making texture packs or mods for it made difficult by questionable dev practices
MineClone2 replicates the gameplay of Minecraft. It mostly works. Yet, I can not recommend the game without reservations.
Reasons:
Inventory items can turn into other items in new MineClone2 versions: E.g. all lapis (a rare gem) items turned into blue dye (can be gotten from flowers). IIRC the reason was that in a refactoring names for items got shuffled, and contributor and maintainer did not seem to understand how item aliases work – their fix was to add a recipe to make lapis from blue dye and to also disable the dropping of blue dye from flowers.
Texture names are not stable: Texture packs and mods that depends on MineClone2 texture names break in new versions. Texture files had stable file names originally, but at some point the dev team decided to put all files in one folder (instead of their mod's texture folders). This made it difficult to know which mod a texture belonged to, which resulted in filenames being prefixed with a mod name. Every time this is done, it breaks every usage of a texture file name in texture packs and other mods, which then need to be updated.
Mods are ill-defined and often tightly coupled: When new functionality is added, it is often added to some existing mod, even if that only makes sense from an aesthetic and not from an architecture point of view. Also, when functionality is rewritten in an incompatible way, in MineClone2 the new implementation often keeps the mod name. This makes it impossible to depend on the presence of certain features. You can not depend on the presence of crying obsidian, as it was added to mcl_core instead of being made its own mod – while the respawn anchor implementation was added to mcl_beds.
I believe the underlying reason for all of these decisions is the same: Contributions are generally valued and accepted – even if their design is so awful that doing nothing would yield a better experience for players and creators of texture-packs and third-party mods.
On your very own sky island, everything is your own fault.
Many other games give the player endless excuses for lacking skill:
Players can thus blame random happenstance. The truth is, obviously, that in these cases, the fault lies with the player:
“NodeCore Skyhell” is so unlike all these games that as the player it is extremely difficult to blame anyone else for your skill issues.
As kimapr pointed out on IRC a while ago this is a different kind of hard than Exile, because in Exile you can blame the environment.
TL;DR: If you think NodeCore is too forgiving and you like knowing that everything is your own fault, give NodeCore Skyhell a try.
Edit: I would appreciate if the person who rated this review as not helpful would tell me why they thought so.
Best way I know to create schematics for your own mods
This mod makes it possible to save and load areas in a Minetest world as schematic files. With it players can build structures in Minetest and save the result to a file in their world folder.
The mod is easy to understand and does not depend on any game – not even
minetest_game. In my opinion that makes it an excellent choice to create schematics, even for beginner mod developers. There even exist special nodes for common use cases – for example, when air should not be placed in a schematic.Saving a schematic:
schems, which is located in the folder of the world you created it in.Loading a schematic:
schems, which should be located in the folder of the world you want it to be in. (Create it if it does not exist.)Mod is way too buggy
I have tested this mod with Mineclonia and can not recommend it.
This seemed true at first glance. The movement blocking felt a bit too jerky though.
When I entered a new world with this mod, I found no obsidian marker, but a bunch of server errors showed up during map generation.
The second time I entered that world, I did find an obsidian border. I assume that the placement code should wait until mapgen is done.
Mined nodes outside the spawn chunk are immediately restored, but since the nodes drop as items, this means that players have an infinite supply of everything that they can mine, which makes resource gathering absurdly easy. It is also trivial to move outside of the chunk with a boat, to explore the world and gather literally limitless resources; upon exiting the boat, the player is teleported back to the spawn chunk.
Nice idea, disappointing execution
I really like the concept; I thought this mod could provide some kind of “undo” for when I craft more than I need.
Then I crafted 4 tree into 16 wood, put it into the decrafting bench and got 2 wooden slabs.
Then I put 4 sandstone blocks in the decrafting bench and got 2 sandstone slabs.
Then 2 bronze blocks turned into 2 bronze slabs and saw the pattern.
Misleading name: The chest does not contain everything!
The name is wrong: This mod only adds a chest with creative inventory items.
There exists a setting to make the chest contain everything. It is off by default.
I wasted several minutes of my life with this mod because of a useless default.
Unclear to me what this is for
This mod adds decorative nodes which contain black text on white background.
The text is a math expression, like “5³”. The nodes seem to have no functionality.
Works as advertised!
Note: This mod works well with MineClone2 / MineClone5 / Mineclonia.
It is not needed there though – the waterlily node has the same purpose.
Nice mod to play with algorithmically generated structures
It seems to me that the “Run your first program” instructions must be done after the “Write your first program” instructions to avoid a crash.
Note that several of the examples do not work if your world does not have the mods
vector3andworldedit.Why is this mod not available for Minetest 5.5+?
Very challenging, unusual and deep game mechanics
I have encountered no other Minetest game yet that felt so much like a survival challenge.
In Exile, simply not dying all the time means that a player is doing something right.
Building an actual house is a challenge – I managed to live in a tiny cave.
Survival tip: Stay warm and make sure you have drinking water.
Very weird usage, but overall okay
This mod basically works by overriding day/night ratio for the player who uses it. This means that the sun and moon do still move, it is just light or dark permanently.
The mod uses the
/ptimecommand to do three things:Enter the command repeately to cycle between the modes.
A possible improvement for this mod would be for the
/ptimecommand to take a parameter, like/ptime dayor/ptime nightor/ptime disable. That way users would no longer have to guess what the command will do.Interesting gameplay change, crashes with fire and TNT
This changes how Minetest works in an interesting way. I suggest to try it out!
I found the following issues with Minetest Game that show that this mod needs work:
Cool idea, but not enough of a timesaver
The stair pick idea is nice, However, I was not able to create corner stairs or upside down stairs. This means I actually do have to craft and place stairs, which I wanted to avoid.
There is a slight visual flicker when a node is turned into a stair. I think this happens because the node is being removed before it is placed. Since the code is old (2013), I assume that back then it might have been necessary, but nowadays I would use
minetest.set_node()to get flicker-free stair picking.Looks good but slows down map generation enormously with default settings
This mod created server lag with default naturalslopeslib settings, on an 8-core machine. IMO these should be adjusted accordingly.
If interacting with the world in singleplayer mode becomes extremely laggy with this mod active, change the naturalslopeslib settings:
Changing “Generation Method” to “Progressive” lead to a non-laggy game. You can also disable “Shape update on generation” to fix this.
Better gameplay for cave explorers!
I tried this mod out and did not expect much from such relatively simple changes to lighting mechanics.
Then, while playing Minetest, I was amazed how much nicer cave exploration felt with a wielded torch.
Cute tech demo. Previous version took ages to load, but that is now fixed!
This mod makes the world a lot more literal.
Long node names are hard to read though; the mod should use line breaks.
This mod slowed loading the game a lot. This was fixed and I can recommend it now.
Part of my earlier critcism is still relevant and there was a conversation, so my previous review can be read below. Note that I have since put the mod
tga_encoderon ContentDB, which makes it trivial to generate textures for Minetest <5.5.This mod does exactly what the description says.
However, it contains three technical flaws:
First, textures are regenerated every time a world is loaded. This is wasteful and not necessary. This is probably what makes it very slow. Second, textures are given via the texture modifier [png. This is wasteful and does not degrade gracefully in older versions. Third, textures are generated as RGBA, even though they are simple monochrome bitmaps.
Here is how I would fix those:
First, write the textures to the filesystem instead of using the [png texture modifier. Second, generate the text textures only if they do not exist on the filesystem yet. Third, use TGA as the file format (~20 bytes header, dump pixels, write footer).
This should result in a mod that is much faster and also compatible with older Minetest versions.
Excellent mod!
This mod makes ore nodes, e.g. iron ore, drop ore beans instead of themselves when dug. Raw ores can be smelted into bars, e.g. smelting raw iron ore beans results in an iron bar. Also 9 raw ore beans can be crafted into a raw iron ore beann node players can build with.