User blog:SamwiseFilmore/For those Interested in Modding - Minetest!

A number of years ago I stumbled upon a game called Minetest. It's an open-source voxel engine that promotes extensive modding (to the point where the actual game is just a collection of mods...). The game in of itself is not that impressive, although it has merit simply for being so extensible, as well as being open source. The engine is written in C++, so rendering is much faster, and FPS is much higher, especially on lower-end hardware. However, all modding is done with a language called Lua, which if fast (for a scripting language) and fairly easy to learn.

If you're interested in modding, the learning curve is a lot less steep than forge modding for minecraft, and in addition, the open source nature of the engine means that if you need something from the modding API, you can go and implement it in the engine. It also means that subsequent versions of the game won't add new items that break you mod, and you don't need to upgrade your mod to work with a new version (unless it's a major version changeover... but those are rare). It's available for most desktop OS's (unless you're using Solaris. But you shouldn't be doing that, so everyone reading this will be supported. :P)

If you're interested, you can get the game and get modding really fast! Let me know if you'd like a little help along the way!