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Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

In 2010 Notch said he'd probably release Minecraft as open source within a few years. I was rather looking forward to that.

Jason Rohrer releases all his games as open source. So there are mobile ports, spinoffs, etc. With the latest game you basically are just paying for a multiplayer account, the whole game is on GitHub.

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On the website he said that he'd release it as open-source after sales started to die.

However now Minecraft is the best-selling game of all time with 238,000,000 copies...

While it's not quite Minecraft, there is an open source game (or rather, game engine) in a very similar style named Minetest[0] with a diverse community and a variety of game designs and mods to choose from.

[0] https://www.minetest.net/

There's also https://veloren.net/ which is similar to minecraft and minecraft has tons of copies on github/youtube

There is no scarcity of open source Minecraft imitators/clones, but Minetest seems to be among the most thoroughly developed. Veloren has some interesting demo videos, for example, but its modding interface is barely a sketch at this point. (The plugin API documentation covers interaction with the chat window, and events for players joining or leaving… and that's about it. There is no way to plugins to actually interact with the game.) A closer match for Minetest would be Terasology[0], which has a modular design based on Java rather than Lua.

[0] https://terasology.org/index.html

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