Minetest is a free and open-source sandbox video game and game creation system with focus on voxel graphics. It is written primarily in C++ and makes use of the Irrlicht Engine. Minetest provides an API for users to write their own games and mods written in Lua. It is cross-platform, being available for Linux-based systems, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, MacOS, and Android.
In Minetest, players explore a blocky, procedurally-generated 3D world spanning approximately 31 000 full blocks in each direction, and may discover and extract raw materials, craft tools and items, and build structures and landscapes. Depending on the game selected and mods present, players can fight computer-controlled "mobs", as well as cooperate with or compete against other players in the same world.
The game mechanics of Minetest are similar to those of the 2009 game Minecraft, though the original author stopped just short of describing it as a "Minecraft clone". Over a decade of active development Minetest has garnered critical acclaim and gained in popularity; since November 2013 Minetest has been downloaded over 1.4 million times from GitHub, and the Android version of Minetest has over 500 thousand downloads on the Google Play store. Minetest has also been used in school education to teach abstract thinking and as an interactive visualization tool. Minetest is free software since November 29, 2010, allowing users to study and modify both the source code and the included art.
Source: Wikipedia, "[en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minetest Minetest]", available under the CC-BY-SA License.