Minetest 5.7.0 released!

Minetest 5.7.0 has been released with improved graphics, performance improvements, and lots more.

The Minetest 5.7.0 release is dedicated to Jude Melton-Houghton (TurkeyMcMac / jwmhjwmh), a core developer who passed away in February.

You can download Minetest from our website. Also check out the full changelog.

Graphics and Performance
Rotating Entity Selection/Hit Boxes
Android Fixed Crosshair
…and more
Links
More screenshots

Graphics and Performance

Post-processing: Bloom and Dynamic Exposure

Minetest now has a post-processing pipeline, with support for Bloom and Dynamic Exposure. This pipeline will allow for new effects to be implemented in the future, such as depth-of-field and volumetric lighting (god rays). Post-processing also improves the performance of tone mapping and allows for settings like saturation adjustment.

Mods and games have control over whether these effects can be enabled on the client. Part of Minetest’s design philosophy is to give more control to game creators, this includes giving games more control over graphics.

Dynamic Exposure is a feature that simulates eyes adjusting when going from a well-lit area into a cave, allowing for high dynamic range (HDR).

A corridoor with blue flooring. Ceiling lights appear to be glowing with a bloom effect. — A screenshot of the Backrooms game with bloom shaders, taken by Extex (CC BY 4.0)

Improved Long-range Performance on Modern Hardware

Minetest is well-known for supporting old hardware, but has often not made the best use of modern and high-end hardware. In 5.7.0, Minetest has a setting that allows better use of the GPU when uploading world data. This results in vastly improved performance on modern hardware at 500+ view ranges. Note that you don’t need to have a discrete GPU, modern integrated GPUs may still benefit from this optimization.

In the future, this optimization is likely to be enabled automatically when Minetest detects that the hardware supports it. But for now, those with modern GPUs will need to change the “Client Mesh Chunksize” (client_mesh_chunk) setting to 4 or 8.

You’ll also need to change some settings to load more of the map, here’s a guide on how to get a larger view range. With these changes, the bottleneck for getting a large view range is how quickly the server can send the map data; it can take a while to fully load a 1000 view range - that is 258,048 nodes in total. Map loading performance is likely to be improved in the future.

Steam Deck: 600 view range at 53 FPS<br>(rubenwardy, CC BY-SA 4.0) — Steam Deck: 600 view range at 53 FPS
(rubenwardy, CC BY-SA 4.0)

1600x1600 area rendering at 20FPS<br>(GreenXenith, CC BY 4.0) — 1600x1600 area rendering at 20FPS
(GreenXenith, CC BY 4.0)

On Steam Deck (left), this optimization improves rendering performance from 10 FPS to 53 FPS on this forest scene - roughly 600 view range.

Other Performance Improvements

Performance improvements aren’t just limited to modern gaming hardware. The occlusion culler has been improved, which provides better performance by not rendering areas that cannot be seen. The culler is faster, too.

To display the world, the client needs to turn blocks into 3d geometry called meshes. The mesh generator is now multithreaded, which will improve performance especially at large view ranges.

Rotating Entity Selection/Hit Boxes

There’s now support for rotating selection and hitboxes. which will allow mobs and players to have more accurate hitboxes. This will make combat much nicer, especially with larger monsters. Unfortunately, this is just for selection/hitboxes, it doesn’t change collision.

Android Fixed Crosshair

Crosshair support for Android has been merged. Unlike desktop, Android defaults to punching/placing/digging where you tap. With this new feature, users can enable the crosshair to have an experience closer to desktop.

…and more

Mods can now find out the player’s window size, which will allow for full-screen and more responsive GUIs.

It’s no longer possible to load a world if mods have unsatisfied dependencies. Before, Minetest would automatically disable these mods - but it led to confusion. You will need to add the missing dependency or disable the mods.