Goanna

Goanna is a game client for Luanti, the voxel game engine formerly called Minetest. It is a standalone program built on the Godot engine. It speaks Luanti's own network protocol to ordinary, unmodified servers, plays the same games, worlds and rules as Luanti's own client, and draws them with a renderer of its own: distant terrain to the horizon, dynamic light and shadow, PBR materials, water, weather and sky.

It is alpha quality. Luanti's own client remains the reference for compatibility and reliability, and Goanna is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Luanti project.

Find your part

Play. Install Goanna, start a world or join a server, learn the controls and settings, and see what does not work yet. Start here if you want to play.

Host. Run a server that Goanna players can join, grant the optional capabilities of the Goanna server mod, and set up an AI game master.

Develop. Build Goanna from source, read how its architecture fits together, run its tests and benchmarks, follow the house style, and carry Luanti code across the right way.

Agents. For coding agents and the people running them: the rules for test clients and the GPU, the control channel that drives a running client, the player agent interface and the director.

Systems. How each part of the renderer and client works today: far rendering, terrain storage, materials, water, sky, weather, lava, ice, particles, the interface and more.

Design. Plans and proposals: the founding plan, the roadmap, the far rendering and material plans, shader pack loading, server capabilities and Freeminer servers.

History. Dated logs and investigations, kept as written, for anyone who wants to know why something is the way it is.

Releases. What changed in each version.

Status

Linux is the supported platform, with Godot 4.5 and a Vulkan capable GPU. Mineclonia is the most thoroughly tested game. Windows and macOS are not play tested, and controller support has only been tested with synthetic input. The player guide lists the current limitations.

Licence

Goanna is LGPL-2.1-or-later, except the texture packs under pbr_packs/ and the asset bundles built from them, which carry their source media's licence per file. The full accounting is in THIRD-PARTY.md. The source is on GitHub.