luanti-org/luanti

What Luanti is

Luanti (formerly Minetest) is a free, open-source voxel game engine, not a single game. It provides the rendering, networking, world storage, and scripting runtime; games and mods written in Lua define content and rules on top of it. It suits players who want to install voxel games, modders who want a lightweight Lua-based platform, and server operators who want to run multiplayer worlds. The engine is written in C++ (C++17) and licensed under LGPLv2.1+ license.

Getting started

1. Get a build or install package. The website is the main entry point for downloads and game discovery: luanti.org.
2. Launch the client. Worlds live in separate folders under user/worlds/; on Windows installed builds user is %APPDATA%\Minetest, on Linux ~/.minetest, and on macOS ~/Library/Application Support/minetest (or a path set by MINETEST_USER_PATH). See the paths table for run-in-place and platform differences paths.
3. Select or install a game, create a world, and start playing. Default controls include WASD to move, left mouse to dig/punch, right mouse to place, I for inventory, T for chat, and Esc for the pause menu controls.
4. The configuration file is user/minetest.conf, created when the client is closed for the first time; pass --config <path-to-file> to use another file, and --help to list command-line options configuration.

To build from source, follow the platform-specific compilation guides for GNU/Linux, Windows, and macOS, starting from the common compiling information compiling.

Using it for development

Games, mods, and server logic are written in Lua; the engine exposes a modding API documented in the developer documentation developer docs. Server operators can run Luanti in Docker using the provided server guide Docker server; Docker is also documented as a development environment Docker development.

Constraints

• Versioning follows major.minor.patch since 5.0.0-dev; major releases may contain breaking changes for games and mods version scheme.
• The repository is the engine itself. A fresh engine install does not include a complete game; you need to select or install a game to play.
• Some actions (zoom, fly, fast, noclip) require the corresponding privilege, so they may not be available in every game or server.

HotRepo's take

The project appears in HotRepo's daily C++ snapshot for 2026-11-05 at 7 new stars and 13,818 total stars, with that day's best C++ list position of 4. The mature star base and long history since 2011 fit an engine whose relevance comes from modding and server ecosystems rather than a single release spike; the current snapshot alone does not establish a longer trend.