The “Cloniest” Minecraft Clone You Will Ever See: ‘Minetest-c55′

In development since October 2010, Minetest-c55 wins the award for resembling Minecraft the most, except there’s not a lot to it and it’s more of a tech demo really….but still!

Before I go on I would just like to point out that we tend to not support cloning games, nor would we typically report on such efforts but we will allow this one exception. So, Minecraft, you all know it and most of you would have played it. Due to Mojang’s sandbox-crafter becoming the success it has, it’s unsurprising that there are a great many clones out there across basically every platform, albeit a lot of them tend to differentiate themselves via unique visuals or a different approach to gameplay.

But Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who is the cloniest of them all? Without a doubt it is Minetest-c55 which manages to mimic Minecraft’s visuals, some of the feel and gameplay without the majority of the great features that makes Minecraft so popular. The game does have Survival and Creative Modes though, and crafting and an inventory system. It even has its own replica Wiki page.

The reason that Minetest c-55, or Mineclone as we have decided to name it, is so feature-less is because quite simply that the development process is very, very slow. In fact it is less of a development process and more of a “learning project”. Despite being initiated back in 2010 as one of the first Minecraft clones, the latest update was January 6th 2012 so it is still going…strong? Probably not the most fitting word. The developer does say that Minetest c-55 is actually just a side project, a hobby, than a more serious project.

For that reason we think it is fairly impressive. It is actually released under GPL too, so things are made a lot easier for the Linux crowd for once. If anything the game is actually a fairly praiseworthy technical feat too. Whereas Minecraft has a height restriction of 128 blocks, Minetest c-55 is limited to approximately 31000 blocks in all directions. The downside of this is that the render distance is pretty shallow.

You win some you lose some. Basically, what you are seeing here with Minetest c-55 is what Minecraft looked like a couple of years ago. It’s doubtful that this clone will really advance much past these stages though. It’s been two years now and the game still has no sounds whatsoever, for instance.

Minetest c-55 can be downloaded for free right here on Windows, Mac and Linux. More information on the game can be found on the official website.