For those who do not know, Minetest is an open-source free-to-play and free-to-modify alternative to Minecraft. It’s Free as in Freedom – and as in Free Lunch.

For the past few days I had been running a  Minetest server – it was fun whilst it lasted, but I have been extremely busy with work and it turns out I need to liberate that server node for something more productive… so for now, Bite Me, and its villages, are defunct.

Intent

Originally the idea was to run a Minetest server with a difference – during the week, an easy setup would have allowed players to create whatever they wanted in the world; settle villages and such, without any aggressive mobs or PvP.

On Friday nights however the world would be backed up, and NSSM would be turned on, PvP would be enabled, and random protector blocks would be deleted.

On Monday, the world would be reverted to its state as registered on Friday.

It would have been oh so fun…

I did keep a backup of the world data though, and all tools I had written to monitor and manage the server. It’ll be back online some day, but with a little bit more pre-prep; I’ll post some of the tools on my github page eventually, including the items allowing swithcing between the week-day safe mode, and the week-end massacre mode…..

Specs

For those of you who are curious about stats and requirements, I was running this on a Ubuntu 16.04 server with 512 MB RAM and 1 GB swap, 20 GB storage (more than enough) and a single CPU at 2.3 GHz, courtesy of digitalOcean.

At peak, I think I had about 10 players all playing simultaneously, with a good few off exploring different caves and causing the map gen to work in several locations siultaneously, and the server was handling fairly well I believe.

I expect if you want to run a properly specced server, 2GB RAM, 2 CPUs and 2GB swap would be a better bet. I might use that in future.

Examples

Here’s some screenshots from when I was exploring as admin:

Exhibit 1 – some weird shadows from the clouds. These shadows were persistent (never changed location), and dark enough that stone monsters would spawn in them….! You can see a htop report showing server stats too

Exhibit 2 – I was using maikerumine’s esmobs mod to generate some difficult mobs. For some reason, they would hardly ever spawn in my main village – but they did everywhere else and my goodness were they a handful… see the log how much damage they would have been doing if I hadn’t my admin shield equipped! (probably from 3d-Armor mod, made easily accessible from the Unified Inventory)

Exhibit 3 – Sokomine’s mg and mg_villages mods, combined with VanessaE’s moretrees mod produce some superb settings…

Mods

Here’s the full list of mods I was using:

https://github.com/minetest-mods/biome_lib
https://github.com/minetest-mods/moretrees
https://github.com/minetest-mods/moreores
https://github.com/minetest-mods/homedecor_modpack
https://github.com/minetest-mods/stamina
https://github.com/minetest-mods/city_block
https://github.com/Sokomine/locks
https://github.com/Sokomine/travelnet
https://github.com/PilzAdam/nether
https://github.com/stujones11/minetest-3d_armor
https://github.com/minetest-technic/unified_inventory
https://github.com/dmonty2/minetest-u_skinsdb
https://github.com/tenplus1/protector
https://github.com/Uberi/MineTest-WorldEdit
https://github.com/Sokomine/mg
https://github.com/Sokomine/mg_villages
https://github.com/Sokomine/cottages
https://github.com/tenplus1/farming
https://github.com/minetest-mods/playeranim
https://github.com/BlockMen/cme
https://github.com/maikerumine/esmobs
https://github.com/NPXcoot/nssm
https://github.com/Sokomine/mobf_trader