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This is a basic tutorial for Minetest.
The ultimate goal is to help Minetest newbies to understand Minetest basics without consulting external documentation all the time. For the tutorial to be effective, I wish this subgame (+ world) to be bundled with Minetest. Simply because you can’t expect newbies to search the forums for that. ;-)
If you wish for the tutorial to be bundled, vote here for the tutorial to be bundled with Minetest. I have officially suggested this tutorial for inclusion here: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=9103
Download: tutorial1.8.2.zip (for Minetest 0.4.13 and later)
How to install and run: See Subgames/Tutorial in the Community Wiki
Download development version (experimental, for testing only): tutorial2.2.0.zip (for Minetest 0.4.15)
The tutorial consists of two intertwined parts: A subgame and a world.
The world looks like this:
https://i.imgur.com/vGawidn.jpg
Here is a screenshot tour through the stations with 15 screenshots (version 1.0.0)
The subgame, called “Tutorial” [tutorial] involves writing a lot of texts and few special tutorial nodes. The texts are implemented in the form of special read-only signs. It is currently based on a modified minetest_game. Minetest_game is basically extremely stripped down and many mods are just removed. I also added labels to all those furnace/chest/inventory formspecs. :)
The world, called “Tutorial World” involves a parcours, but the paths branch early so it is not too boring. The tutorial is built into several sections, and there are signs which do the explanation. As a little help, a couple of gold bars help the player keep track of the tutorial and a message pops up when the first, and when all gold bars have been collected. Having collected all gold bars implies the player went through all stations. This is completely optional and only a guide.
The following topics are covered by the tutorial:
- Walking, jumping, looking around, using the camera
- Swimming and diving
- Climbing ladders
- Pointing
- Using blocks
- Sneaking
- Health and damage
- Death and respawning
- Items, item stacks, collecting and dropping
- Using the inventory and hotbar
- Tools
- Mining and block drops
- Special nodes: falling nodes, attached nodes, jump-denying nodes and damaging nodes
- Liquids (source vs flowing, viscosity)
- Building
- Crafting (includes group crafts)
- Smelting
- Tool repairing
- Misc. information about Minetest (optional supplemental information)
Principles of this tutorial:
- Be a generic tutorial, teach stuff which applies to pretty much all subgames/mods/etc.
- Try to avoid teaching mod and subgame-specific stuff as much as possible unless it is done as an example only (this means I will usually reject very mod-specific suggestions)
The tutorial has been fully translated to German. Other partial translations are available, with Dutch and Greek being mostly finished.
If you want to provide translations, read this.
Why didn’t I write a tutorial for a specific subgame, like minetest_game? Because 1) this may change in the future and the tutorial may get easily outdated, 2) the basic stuff like mining is the same for every subgame, so it would have to be explained at one point anyways.
Also, it eases maintenance. It basically only really needs to be updated when new prominent engine features appear.
There is a Git repository, but only for the subgame. Here is the subgame’s project page:
http://repo.or.cz/w/minetest_tutorial_subgame.git
Edit: I updated the entire post for version 1.0.0, to summarize the Tutorial properly.