In this lesson we’ll be looking at how to download and install Minetest, Mods, Texture Packs, and games. I’ll be showing all this on Linux Mint in this video, if you’re using Windows please check out the Windows version of this lesson.

Minetest is available for:

• Windows XP and newer.
• GNU/Linux, most distros.
• macOSAndroid 4.0 or later.
• FreeBSD
• And source code is all available so if you have a different system you can compile your own build.

::WARNING::
Be sure you download Minetest only from Minetest.net, there are rogue versions of Minetest being distributed that include ads, force you to pay for privs, or even log all chat messages on servers and send them to somebody. The only guaranteed clean versions of Minetest will be found on Minetest.net.
::WARNING::

I'm going to use the PPA to get the latest stable version, you could also use the daily unstable build, but at times it does get unstable, so it's probably best to stick with stable unless you know what you're doing, and at that point you may as well be compiling from source yourself. We'll open a terminal, Ctrl + Alt + T, and type in sudo add-apt-repository ppa:minetestdevs/stable. We'll get a prompt to endter out password, and once we successfully do that, it will give us a bit of information about the PPA and let us accept or decline adding it with Enter or Ctrl+C. Of course we want to add it, so we'll hit enter. A few things will print out in the terminal and then we'll want to type in sudo apt-get update. Your system will check for updates and new software. Once completed you can install Minetest by typing sudo apt-get install minetest. Once that is completed you can launch minetest by opening the menu and clicking on Minetest.

Mods, games, and Texture packs can all be downloaded from the forums, I’ll pick some totally random ones, but you should browse around and find some to try out for yourself.

For the game I’ll be downloading and installing Survival which is an incomplete game I started. We’ll just download the zip file for now, you’ll find it here, at the bottom of the first post. Usually on any topic the downloads will be in the first post. Once the file is downloaded extract it into the games directory located in /home/username/.minetest. If you don’t see the directory you likely have hidden files not shown, you can show them with Ctrl +H. You don’t need to rename the directory, as the engine reads the game’s name from a configuration file.

The process is much the same for downloading and installing mods, I’ll be downloading my Drinks mod. We’ll download the zip file again, as we did for the game, and extract that into the mods folder in our Minetest directory. Some mods may require you to rename the folder, this particular mod doesn’t, because it has a configuration file with the mods name, but if you ever get an error about a mod failing to load because of disallowed characters, there is a good chance the folder needs to be renamed. The mod topic will always have the proper name for the mod in the last set of brackets.

Installing texture packs isn’t that different, again we’ll look on the forums and select something, this time summerfields. Download and extract into the Textures folder. We don’t need to ever rename texture packs, but you can if you’d like.

Now that we have one of each of these resources let’s look at how to use them in the game. Launch minetest, and click on the local game tab, it’s the default, so it’s probably already selected. On the bottom you’ll see a row of icons, hovering over them you’ll see their name, click on survive and you’ll notice that the background changes. You’ve now selected that game, and can create a new world by clicking the new button. Type in a name. If you want you can type something in the seed box, or leave it blank and Minetest will randomly pick a seed. Clicking the box behind mapgen will open a dropdown menu where you can pick a different mapgen, you might want to play around with different options a little bit to see what types of different worlds are available, to finish click the Create button on the bottom left.

Clicking on Play Game will start the new world, but let’s enable our mod first Click the Configure button. You’ll see a list of all available mods. You won’t see nearly as many as are listed here, there should just be the one you downloaded. There are two ways to enable a mod, either double click on it’s name, or click on the name once, and then click the little box in front of the word enabled up top. The mod’s name will turn green, letting you know that you have successfully enabled the mod. Click save to go back to the previous screen. Before we start the world lets change our texturepack. Click on the Texturepacks tab on the top menu and select the texturepack you downloaded. You might see a screenshot and short description appear on the left, but not all texture packs include this. There is no save button here, just click the texturepack you want and then click back to the local game tab and click on play game. Your world will start up.

Controls are fairly basic, WASD to move around, I to open inventory Spacebar to jump, and shift to sneak. Left click to punch and break items, and right click to place items and open inventories on nodes. The Esc key pulls up the menu and lets you quit the world or game entirely. You should now have a decent understanding of how to Install Minetest, mods, games, texturepacks, and how to enable all of those resources. You are on your way to becoming a Minetest master, all that remains, is learning to write mods which we'll do in the next chapter.