this will probably get downvoted to hell but im just gonna say it: minetest is just not as good as minecraft (and tbh i don't think it ever will be)
now to be clear im not happy what microsoft is doing lately with minecraft but i really like the older versions of the game (1.7 era) and those are way better than what minetest offers - also minecraft has a larger player base so there are tons of free/open source mods
Well, Minetest also can hardly be compared to Minecraft as Minetest is only an engine or platform for voxel based games like Minecraft. What you rather have to critique is something like Mineclonia that is apparently a more active fork of the MineClone2/VoxeLibre project that try to perfectly replicate Minecraft (without using Minecraft assets that is) on Minetest. Allegedly it's pretty good now but I haven't tried so myself. As already mentioned, the community for Minetest as a whole is pretty small and that additionally split among so many different games building on that. But it's good that viable alternatives exist in case Microsoft ever considers shutting down the Java edition.
My brother in Christ, the entire game is mod based. The default unmaintained Minetest Game isn't even preinstalled in new versions.
Performance wise it will blow Minecraft out of the water usually. However, keep in mind it still doesn't scale between cores very well. Before it was all single core but now it has support for multi core although performance is still limited on high core count CPUs.
Performance depends on the mod. I have a server in my house that has a Minecraft and Minetest server installed so we can play locally. The Minetest server is extremely laggy. Rubberbanding all the time. But we play it more than Minecraft.
Love me playing some Minetest with the Asuna game. It's the perfect expansion of the basic game formula and a beautiful world to put other mods on top of.
It's kind of hard to me playing Minetest. Not only for the fact that I don;t think Minecraft is that much fun, but also because the Android version has a confusing UI and weird controls.
I'm restricted to playing the Android version because, I don;t have a PC, duh!
I don’t play Minecraft because it is too trippy alone.
I build this Moria kind of place and realize it’s scary to the point I am constantly glancing behind me in the tunnels.
I usually either play games 12 hours straight or not at all (adhd?). They all become slightly trippy but Minecraft is seriously eerie after such time and solitude becomes unbearable.
Have you tried modoacks? A lot if them have a quest book and a goal and some(skyblock* modpacks) dont have an open world, only the sky* and a small island
I've been having fun with VoxeLibre lately on single-player mode. Nothing too fancy, gameplay is eerily similar to vanilla Minecraft. I'm looking forward to trying other games built on the engine that offer a bit more variation.
One nice thing is that the android version of Minetest is compatible with the PC version, so it is possible to sync save files and play on the go. It also seems to load faster than Minecraft does.
Any mod recommendations for a 5 year old? He's got a laptop with Debian on it and I'd like to set him up with MineTest, but I'm not sure he can handle the full MineClonia experience.