Minetest is confusingly both a game engine and a playable game. You probably only ever played the basic sandbox game it comes with by default and thought that was it had to offer. There exist much more feature rich and developed games on the minetest engine. many many games and mods and texture packs.

You may be interested to know about the game 'mineclone2' developed on the minetest engine, which aims to be a faithful FOSS clone of minecraft specifically. I am actually a dev of mineclone2 and can tell you I believe that it is the next best thing to the real deal. A lot of hard work and time and polish has gone into the game by many talented people. Its not perfect, there are rough edges, some things still need work, but its a stable and faithful vanilla experience. Its far superior to minecraft in both performance and modability. Plus bugs are getting squashed and more features are getting added all the time both to mineclone2 and the minetest game engine.

Mineclone2 git: https://git.minetest.land/MineClone2/MineClone2

minetest engine homepage: https://www.minetest.net/

Mineclone2 Lemmy community: https://lemmy.world/c/mineclone2

Mineclone2 mastadon: https://mastodon.social/@MineClone2@fosstodon.org

My lo-fi gemini proxy mirrors for minetest and mineclone2. https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/tilde.team/~smokey/minetest-mirror.gmi https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/tilde.team/~smokey/mcl2-mirror.gmi