Clover and I have started playing Minetest. So far we’ve just played the default game mode, and once we loaded a metamod called Dreambuilders which includes a bunch of other mods. It was a bit too much for our purposes, but was a great learning mod to see what is possible.
We recently changed our room arrangement, and the couch isn’t in front of the TV, so using a keyboard and mouse wasn’t the best option of kiddo. I played on my XPS13 (meaning fairly small screen), and Clover wanted to trade devices next time.
Here’s what I’m surprised by: how much better Minetest is than Minecraft, out of the box. All these little quality of life changes, such as just being able to craft with 9 boxes from your inventory, or not having block drop, instead going directly into inventory. Basically I hate inventory in most games.
I’m still not entirely sure which parts of the game are which; the concept of “game” and “mod” are used kinda loosey-goosey on marketing pages, and I feel I’d be served by forgetting Minecraft and approaching it with a beginner’s perspective. The issue of course is that I played Minecraft Server Admin for years, and I haven’t even looked into hosting options of Minetest…
But we are definitely going to host a multiplayer server! Clover has named it Hummingbird Valley. We are going for a farming village simulator theme, so: Stardew Valley, Harvest Moon, Slime Rancher, Banished, Animal Crossing, those kinds of situations and resources.
We don’t need all the things in the Dreambuilder mod, but that will be my starting point to slowly build up which mods are interesting and fit the specific feel we’re going for. 