I like travelling, and since I don’t have the money to be able to afford it, I make do for other forms of travel aside physical travel. One way to travel without actually leaving your home is to hop on the internet, and games like minetest make the experience even better, because you’re in a game world where there is a limitless possibilities and entities to explore.
I’ve always had the intentions of trying out some games recently, and minetest was the last one I thought I’d try first. I initially planned on first trying splinterlands, then psyberx and cryptoshots. I’ve known about splinterlands for a while and have read several posts about it on @josediccus’s blog. Psyberx and cryptoshots however, I’ve only found out about recently.
Minetest is a blocky world video where you get to explore and build your own world in whatever fashion you like. It is open source and so customizable however you want, and it’s built on sandbox, a popular metaverse project you might have heard among the top 3 metaverse projects. If you’ve played Minecraft before, minetest is basically just like Minecraft in terms of game mechanics.
What is interesting is how I found out about minetest. If it wasn’t for Mr Dragon, guardian of the neoxian city, I probably wouldn’t be talking about minetest today with this much excitement. Since the city chat moved to discord, he introduced the minetest game as a little fun game for us to play in the city. I hear a lot of the citizens saying it is addictive, and after playing it last night, I understand why now.
Gameplay And My First Impression
Honestly I was wowed when I saw what a creative world Mr Ray had created for the city on minetest. I spawned in front of the city and was met with a very beautiful view on the city’s gate, which happened to either be Mr Ray’s house, or close to it.
It didn’t take me long to see the monsters and aliens the citizens of the city had been talking about all day in the discord server. I honestly was taken by surprise when I saw them because I didn’t think I’d meet them that soon. I thought it’d take me a while before I run into them.
Running into them helped me though, because now I have to figure out the controls very fast if I don’t want to get killed by them. It took me like 2 minutes, I think, to figure out the controls, but even after an entire night of playing, I still having mastered them like I did with a game pad for FIFA. I guess that’ll happen eventually though.
Shortly after figuring out controls, I was on the move to get away from these creatures to safety and find myself some land to start building my land. I met another hinderance here. You see when I said I figured out the controls earlier, I meant I figured out which key was for movement in the different directions, and how to switch my camera view. I didn’t know you could jump at this point. I find that out when I got myself into a situation. I fell into a hole just near where I spawned, and took about 1 minute to realize the Space Bar was the key used for jumping. Unfortunately by this time, one of the monsters had shot some sort of blockers to corner me in a tight spot but I still got away, only to be killed by some other spider-looking monster shooting some lethal weapon.
After respawning, I didn’t move for about a minute, but took my time looking around with my mouse, and switching my camera view to figure out the best path to take. Lucky me! I realized there had been a staircase staring at me the first time I spawned, but I was too busy looking around and being wowed by the environment. I headed straight for the staircase this time.
Maybe I wasn’t so lucky after all. The blocker shooting monster shot some blockers in front of me as I climbed up and I was caught unable to move on the stairs. As I wiggled my way out of each block, it shot new ones to block me even more. I waited for a long time for some other creature to come put me out of my misery so I would just respawn and continue my game.
Then after a while of waiting, I turned around to look for other alternative routes out of there, but didn’t find any. Up the stairs was the only path that would lead me anywhere productive, I was sure of it. So I ended doing what we wouldn’t advice people do in real life. SUICIDE. I threw myself from the stairs for some creature to finish me, and lucky for me, some spider looking creature gave me a quick death. “I call that mercy”.
If you’ve played minetest at all, you know that I was in for one of a game. I didn’t know that the changes from the previous session you spawned from would follow you into the session of that spawn. Almost the entire staircase was blocked with the blocker from that spider creature and on top of that, one annoying bee stung me to death immediately I spawned. Didn’t even give me enough time to process the fuckery I was about to go through.
Just look at this. Even a chicken came for my head at one point. That was how helpless I was. I stood there and watched as that chicken flew closer and closer to me because I knew I wasn’t very familiar with the controls to be able to outrun it. And standing there, I couldn’t do anything but shooo it away with whatever it was in my hand. Damn bird wasn’t up for no games though and kept at it until I was DEAD!
I struggled with gameplay because I didn’t take my time to configure my keys and what they do earlier in the course of setup of the game. If you don’t want to end up like me, helpless and violated by both meer chickens (or duck or whatever the hell that thing was) and bees, your first order of business when you set up shop needs to be to configure your controls or keys.
As you can see from the gameplay and screenshots, minetest is not the complex and advanced graphic video games in God of War Style. It is very basic in terms of both graphics and gameplay. The movements are kinda boring, but okay in my opinion and I’ll recommend to you if you’re about exploring or you like to check out metaverse-like games.
I think it is also worth mentioning that the game by default doesn’t have monsters inside it, but the monsters are a mod added to the default game. So by default, you don’t have crazy chickens attacking you or bees stinging you.
I’ve loved gaming since I was a little boy, but gaming has been one of the two things I gave up growing up, and I think that is about to change now after minetest. I think I’ll be getting more involved with web3 games, lining up splinterlands and psyberx, even though these 2 might be a little more advanced than minetest. If you want to explore a game world of endless possibilities, definitely hop on minetest, and if you want to have a freaking good time aside minetest gameplay, hop on to The Neoxian City Discord Server
PS: I wrote and recorded the play preview several days ago, but haven’t been able to post it until now. It is worth mentioning that I’ve played minetest a lot more, and thanks to Mr Dragon’s guidance, I am a better player now. Maybe I should write a part 2 explaining the technical aspects of minetest which involves the real exploring… Building houses, finding treasures and killing monsters. I’ll leave you with this for now.
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