Minecraft is substantially farther along in terms of gameplay, mechanics, details, etc. than Luanti. You will probably have more fun playing Minecraft.

That being said, Luanti is free and also pretty fun.

So my advice is if you only want to play one, play Minecraft. But if you want to, play both.

Luanti is good for the user made games. So many of them, there’s one decent backrooms game too, I know there are rare finds.

But, minecraft is unkillable and unreplacable. I play with a tombstone and a minimap addon. I also have a herobrine mod that isn’t from the fog, and apparently herobrine likes to charge creepers so the early game was difficult.

There is an lotr game for luanti you should check it.

Luanti has a questionable menuing is awful. Survival craft has a better system and that’s one game you completely forgot. I personally like it but it’s mostly actual survival, like hunting and trying not to die to feral beasts. The night in survival craft is terrifying.

But vintage story is where you want to be. It’s gaining momentum.

If you want to play old minecraft either try multimc or betacraft launcher, that version of the game is also unique.

As much as I don’t wanna recommend it for personal gripes, I’d say go with minecraft if you want more content in general due to the size of the fan base.

If you don’t care as much and just wanna play a voxel sandbox game and don’t care about having as big of a backlog of fan made content, Luanti ( formerly MineTest ) is a fine enough platform.

The drawbacks for mc, in my opinion, are pretty much things like chat verification ( assuming they actually went through with that ) for basically all messages you send, even in single player mode. And, assuming they didn’t back down and did parity on java with the bedrock version that chat and signs are censored to make sure in every single way you play, either online or single player, is child friendly by replacing all characters with asterisks. I personally left over both of those because I prefer not being treated like a child and having parental controls forced on me.

Also, drawback for mc bedrock is how they, still, after years have bugs where you’ll just randomly start taking damage or will be placing blocks that will not actually place, causing you to die from falling if you are high enough or other similar bugs. Works in single player, too, as far as I’m aware. Rubber banding kind of issues that I don’t know if they’ve actually fixed yet. I’d hope they have, but I doubt it. There’s a reason I’ve heard that version be called “bugrock” many times before in the past. Besides that, the bedrock version is also home to a marketplace where you have to use purchased in-game currency. Just something to keep in mind, despite it not being something you have to ever use. Also, that version doesn’t have access to basically any of the mods the java version has.

The drawbacks with Luanti are the fact that there’s a much more limited amount of content available in comparison to the behemoth mc. You have some games like VoxeLibre ( formerly MineClone2 ) and Age of Mending that are getting updated, but there are a lot more games not being updated because they’re either already completed or abandoned. You’ll also have some trial and error if you turn on a lot of mods for your save in any of the games because even if they say they’ll work in a game because dependencies are met, you still might have mods that instantly crash your save and give you an error that they won’t work for some reason or another. If you know lua you might be able to fix the errors, but do you really want to spend all that time fixing errors and getting a mod to work or would you rather just play without them? Same sort of problem, depending on the game, applies if you apply mods like Unified Inventory or any other Just Enough Items type inventory changing mods, like if you try on VoxeLibre. Haven’t figured out how to get Unified Inventory to work on there.

On the subject of specific games, for VoxeLibre ( one of the games trying to be a Luanti parity of minecraft ), you’ll probably be updates upon updates behind minecraft for a really long time or until the devs either quit or are forced to quit by macrohard/mojangles sending a cease and desist letter or something similar. Features that work just fine on mc, like redstone, might be buggy or don’t work the exact same on voxelibre. For example, due to differences in TNT explosion physics ( I assume ), TNT cannons don’t work despite the redstone for basic ones working just fine. Also, as a fault of Luanti in general, if you look in controls, your “Aux1” key is the sprint key in voxelibre, but absolutely nothing tells you that.

Try Vintage Story! The devs are high quality and there are plenty of mods. Plus the graphics range is accommodating for potato computers and beefy rigs.

Minecraft is simply superior in every imaginable way as an actural game that you acturally play. Luanti is a project you develop but its not really something you play, you test it. Luanti feels awful, looks awful, and is the absolute definition of “at least its open source”. Open source gaming simply doesn’t make any sense.

(Also I absolutely hate the name Luanti, if you look it up to you wont find anything about the game nevermind I just keep misspelling it and it sounds like the programming project it is rather than a game)

Omg! Thanks for this! I haven’t heard of minetest and it’s downloaded.

Minecraft

If you liked OG Minecraft try playing some mods but do Minecraft Java instead of Bedrock

Assuming you’d have to re-buy Minecraft, I’d.say at least give Luanti a try. At the very least, Its free, so you can switch if you don’t like it.

That said, personally, I had too many issues with it. Specifically, I had performance issues, found that the graphics that looked worse (subjectively) and were much harder to modify, and kept running into roadblocks that were annoying to fix, like having to figure out how to grant myself permissions for a bunch of different actions.

If you got burnt out on Minecraft have a look at Vintage Story too

You can try both, see what you like.

I still like Minecraft Java more than Luanti.

My main grip with Luanti is world size. You can totally get to the world end in a few hours. I like the infinity of Minecraft.

Something that may influence your decision: Minecraft by default requires a Microsoft account.

Look into Drasl if you want to set up a Minecraft server without needing one

Minecraft bedrock edition is bad

I like Luanti, because it has a more mature community and more extensive mining gameplay.

As others have said. Minecraft of the more known and established. Luanti is awesome though. It can do “Minecraft” and so much more. I’d say it really comes down to external factors.

Do your friends already play Minecraft. And if the don’t, are they going to have money to put towards it? In the end there’s nothing saying you can’t do both. I will say this though. Installing and running a dedicated server for Minecraft, bedrock at least. Was way harder than luanti. But if you aren’t planning on self hosting then you don’t have to worry about that.