Welcome to this Luanti course, I'm Nathan, and I'll be your host.

This course is designed to teach you how to make your own mods and games for the Luanti engine, formerly known as Minetest.

If you have previous experience with Luanti and coding you can safely jump ahead to the first chapter, otherwise stick around and you'll learn how to Install Luanti, games, and mods.

So what is Luanti? Well Luanti is a free, open source, voxel game engine, available for most operating systems. You can download games and mods to play locally, or connect to one of many servers and play without needing to download anything.

Luanti is composed of two basic components, the engine, Luanti, and a game, of which there are plenty to choose from. Games can be extended by adding mods. Now games are just a collection of mods, so once you've started writing mods it's not very difficult to start making your very own custom game.

Luanti is free, and requires no account or internet access to play, so you can download and install on as many devices as you want. This makes it infinitely scale-able and perfect for the classroom or kiddos. Luanti can comfortably run on some pretty old hardware, although you might have to turn off some of the eye candy.

Luanti also has a large community of developers and modders that are very helpful when trying to figure out how to do something, just be polite when asking for help, remember nobody is being paid to do any of this.

The lua programming language has a fairly low barrier of entry, and is used for many games, and non game applications, meaning there is lots of documentation available, and the knowledge you gain can be carried on into other projects.

So let's download and install Luanti! Visit luanti.org/downloads and select the most appropriate package. Follow standard installation procedures. Luanti will let you know when there is an update available, although depending on your operating system, and method of installation an update manager might handle that for you. If not you'll just have to visit this page again and download the new version. New versions of the engine can be safely installed without any worries of data loss, though it is worth noting that backward compatibility is not always guaranteed, a future update could break a game/mod that hasn't been updated in a long time.

Upon launching Luanti for the first time we'll be greeted with a little message prompting us to install a game. Clicking the Install a game button will take us to the Games section of the in-game content browser. We'll install Minetest game, and then click on the Mods tab and install a mod. I'll search for on of my mods and install that.

While there is a lot of content available to download in-game, there is more content on the forums that hasn't made it's way over. Manually installing varies depending on installation method and operating system.

Now that we have a game and a mod installed let's create our first world. Click New, enter a name and seed, and check any options you want, then click create. With the newly created world selected click on Select Mods, and double click on the mod(s) you want to enable on the world. Click save, and then Play Game to start your new world.

Controls are fairly standard, WASD to move, right and left click to interact with the world. You can see all the controls and change them as you please in the Keyboard and Mouse section of the settings page.

The last thing we need to cover is the code editor. I'll be using Pulsar, but if you have a code editor you are already using, feel free to keep using it. Pulsar is also open-source and available on Linux, Mac and Windows.

Download and install the appropriate package for you system and then launch Pulsar. I'm using a few packages to make development easier. You can find those packages in the preferences page.

To Open the preferences page use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Comma or edit/preferences, click on the Install button, then search for lua. I'm using, language-lua, linter-lua, and autocomplete-lua. Some of these packages may require other packages to run, but they will prompt you to install those when you click the install button.

Well that should be everything we need to get started. In the next chapter we'll be looking at creating our first mod.