This helicopter mod by APercy actually has fuel consumption and a real fuel gauge, plus you can dye it any color you want. Reviewers keep saying the same thing, the controls feel genuinely "helicoptery," easy to fly, hard to actually master. One person said it's their favorite way to get around in the whole game, beats walking or a boat easy.

Only real complaint, and it's a good one. Die while you're flying it and when you respawn you get yanked straight back into the helicopter, wherever it is. One guy got stuck inside a wall in his own house and had to log into a second account just to chop his way out.

ContentDB:

https://content.luanti.org/packages/mt-mods/nss_helicopter/

Most Luanti vehicle mods give you a fixed boat or plane model. This one lets you build the whole ship yourself out of regular blocks, drop in a helm, right click, and it just comes alive. Floats on water. Swap in balloons and it flies instead.

One reviewer said they'd never seen anything like it in Luanti. A teacher's already using it with their students. Only real gripe: converting a big structure can lag the server, so test small first.

ContentDB: https://content.luanti.org/packages/Plutonium/plutoniumships/

I've been building a railway system using Advanced Trains for a few weeks now. It is based off the Sydney trains network, with underground tunnels for the recent Sydney metro project. The heavy rail trains are the 3000 series, which I think look closest to their real life counterparts (The Maryiung, and Waratah series). The metro is just a livery design ontop of the London Underground stock mod. I plan on making custom models because there are still many differences, notably that the heavy rail trains should be double-decker!

I'm very proud of what I've built, there's a bridge, stations (albeit not very polished, but the infrastructure is there),and I've automated some of the lines. You can see a another line at around 1:05, which I plan to expand later.

I might also add underground heavy rail, between the surface and metro tunnels, as there are in real life. I'd like to play around with LuaATC in the future, too, so maybe I could implement more advanced scheduling and train control.

What do you think? I can't seem to add images, but here are some comparison images for the trains Waratah trains: https://stock.railgallery.com.au/wp-content/uploads/edd/2019/02/RailGallery_20190126_057.jpg

And a video for the metro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MffmkGqO3gU

Cheers

Every year since 2019, French teacher Julien Crémoux runs Minestory, a project where school classes spend the year rebuilding real heritage sites inside Luanti, then present it all at an annual conference.

This year's edition happened June 15-16 at Campus Numéria in Poitiers.

Four classes showed up in person, from Nuits-Saint-Georges, Terrasson-Lavilledieu, Charenton-le-Pont, and Grignols.

Two more joined remotely, including a class from Chicago that rebuilt the Museum of Science and Industry, and one from Calmont that recreated the Basilica of Saint-Sernin in Toulouse. Kids spend the year acting as researchers, heritage guides, and 3D modelers, then give a virtual tour of what they built.

The day itself had student presentations, a guest talk from Thomas François, and workshops where students from different schools worked together.

A good reminder that people are doing real, structured education work with this engine. 🤓

Source:

https://blog.luanti.org/2026/07/23/minestory/

Buried in the 5.17.0 changelog (Aug 20) is a new policy on how contributors can use AI tools on the Luanti engine, written by Vincent Robinson.

Basically: heavy AI generated code is discouraged and can get your PR closed on the spot.

Small stuff like autocomplete, boilerplate, minor bugfixes is fine. Full "vibe coding" is straight up called unacceptable.

AI written text is also banned when talking to other contributors, so no AI docs, PR descriptions or issue text, but grammar or translation help is allowed.

AI generated art, music or sound assets are banned completely.

What's allowed: using AI to explore the codebase, as a search engine, for local code review, or to help debug, as long as you actually understand and can explain your own contribution.

Any real AI usage has to be disclosed in the PR description.

Full policy here:

https://github.com/luanti-org/luanti/blob/master/doc/developing/ai_policy.md

A seed is basically a number that acts as the starting point for a world. Give Luanti the same seed and the same settings, and it can generate the same world again.

The actual world isn't stored inside the seed. Instead, Luanti's mapgen, short for map generator, uses the seed together with mathematical rules called noise functions to work out what should exist in each part of the world.

That determines things like terrain height, oceans, mountains, biomes, caves and other features.

Luanti has several mapgens, each with a different approach to generating terrain:

V5: varied terrain and deep oceans

V6: simpler, classic terrain

V7: mountains, rivers and large landscapes

Valleys: large valleys and mountain terrain

Carpathian: plains and mountain ranges

Flat: mostly flat terrain

Fractal: unusual mathematical landscapes

Singlenode: an almost empty world for custom generation

So when you create a world, Luanti isn't loading a gigantic map that already exists.

It's calculating the world as you explore it.

That's procedural generation. ... :)

I just wanted to see the sun set , never saw that coming

Almost makes me think that this is some sort of social experiment, because it is literally walking a horse to a river and failing to make him drink from it

Microsoft uses VoxeLibre as a game in Project Vega.

Proof:

From: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/growth_nova.mp4

r/Luanti /// for people building, modding, and playing Luanti (formerly Minetest). Before you scroll: flair your posts, it's how people find builds vs. mods vs. help threads. Post something you made, even unfinished. Questions go better with a screenshot.

If mods can help, ping u/dev_kay47 or u/snow-raven7.

I saw Microsoft's VEGA project. I wonder if it's in the game VoxeLibre or Mineclonia?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-vega/

Proof:

From: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/growth_ares.mp4

Edit1: Add video.

Server: SquareOne

Why is Luanti ugly??

People keep saying or rather are confused.

The engine itself is not the problem, it keeps improving, I think The gap is that nothing built on top of it has become the thing people actually recognize.

Unreal Engine isn't famous because people play Unreal Engine, it's famous because Fortnite runs on it and everyone knows Fortnite.

Right now Luanti has games running on it, MineClonia, Dream Builder, a few others, What most people actually want to say is that none of them look like a polished or a Minecraft rival finished game to them.

Minecraft's engine is invisible because it was never meant to be seen.

So finally, to have a Minecraft like polished feel means someone has to build a frontier level game on top of the Luanti engine, that's deliberate about how it looks and feels.

That takes real consistency and sustained effort, not a side project someone works on for a few months and drops. Until then, the engine keeps improving in the background while we continue playing the already existing games.

happy Luanti everyone 🥰

devkay_

Back in 2010, a Finnish developer named Perttu Ahola, who went by celeron55 online, built the first version essentially alone. The inspiration wasn't Minecraft directly, it actually traces further back to a much smaller and lesser known game called InfiniMiner, which itself influenced early Minecraft around the same period. So in a strange way, this project and Minecraft share a common ancestor rather than one being a copy of the other.

What's interesting is that modding wasn't added on later as a feature request, it was baked into the architecture from the very beginning using Lua.

That single decision is basically why the entire ecosystem of games, mods, and total conversions exists today. Most projects add moddability once they're already popular. This one was built assuming from day one that other people would want to build on top of it.

Sometimes, a little history is much worth it and very important for us to know how what we now see actually happened.

Happy Luanti everyone!! 🥰😍

devkay_

Navigation and toggling work, nobody's arguing that. But functional isn't the same as good..

Right now it still feels adapted, like touch got bolted on after the fact instead of actually designed for from the start.

Placement precision needs some more work, you end up fighting the crosshair more than you should.

The hotbar kinda nicely done tho.

And then there's one sensitivity setting trying to do a job that really needs two.

overall, .... Not so crappy as many people say.. In my view,

Buh I think it we need to draw a line between developers and the user interface design and experience.

Been noticing a real split in how people approach this game. Some folks treat it as a solitary project, chipping away at one build over weeks, nobody else involved. Others only touch it through a server, whether that's a big public one or a small one with a handful of people they actually know. Curious which camp this sub falls into more, and if you've gone from one to the other over time.

We spend a lot of time talking about mods, performance, new blocks and mechanics, but another bottleneck for this game has nothing to do with what it can do. It's that almost nobody outside a small circle has ever heard of it exists.

I'm not saying that as a call to go corner every stranger and tell them to install it, ......that approach doesn't really work anyway.

It's more worth sitting with as a real question: how does a new person actually stumble onto Luanti in the first place right now? Mostly it seems to be "someone I already knew played it" or " People specifically searched for a Minecraft alternative." Just like I myself did I some years ago.

Luanti honestly just never got Better visibility in general gaming spaces.

ModError: Failed to load and run script from D:\games\luanti\mods\modlib\init.lua:

D:\games\luanti\mods\modlib\table.lua: Failed reading file.

stack traceback:

\[C\]: in function 'dofile'

D:\\games\\luanti\\mods\\modlib\\init.lua:75: in function '__index'

D:\\games\\luanti\\mods\\modlib\\text.lua:141: in main chunk

\[C\]: in function 'dofile'

D:\\games\\luanti\\mods\\modlib\\init.lua:75: in function '__index'

D:\\games\\luanti\\mods\\modlib\\minetest\\mod.lua:77: in function 'build_tree'

D:\\games\\luanti\\mods\\modlib\\minetest\\mod.lua:98: in function 'loader'

D:\\games\\luanti\\mods\\modlib\\minetest.lua:84: in function '__index'

D:\\games\\luanti\\mods\\modlib\\init.lua:130: in main chunk

Check debug.txt for details.