WorldEditAdditions: More WorldEdit commands for Minetest

Personally, I see enormous creative potential in games such as Minetest. For those who aren't in the know, Minetest is a voxel sandbox game rather like the popular Minecraft. Being open-source though, it has a solid Lua Modding API that allows players with a bit of Lua knowledge to script their own mods with little difficulty (though Lua doesn't come with batteries included, but that's a topic for another day). Given the ease of making mods, Minetest puts much more emphasis on installing and using mods - in fact most content is obtained this way.

Personally I find creative building in Minetest a relaxing activity, and one of the mods I have found most useful for this is WorldEdit. Those familiar with Minecraft may already be aware of WorldEdit for Minecraft - Minetest has it's own equivalent too. WorldEdit in both games provides an array of commands one can type into the chat window to perform various functions to manipulate the world - for example fill an area with blocks, create shapes such as spheres and pyramids, or replace 1 type of node with another.

Unfortunately though, WorldEdit for Minetest (henceforth simply WorldEdit) doesn't have quite the same feature set that WorldEdit for Minecraft does - so I decided to do something about it. Initially, I contributed a pull request to node weighting support to the //mix command, but I quickly realised that the scale of the plans I had in mind weren't exactly compatible with WorldEdit's codebase (as of the time of typing WorldEdit for Minetest's codebase consists of a relatively small number of very long files).

(Above: The WorldEditAdditions logo, kindly created by @VorTechnix with Blender 2.9)

To this end, I decided to create my own project in which I could build out the codebase in my own way, without waiting for lots of pull requests to be merged (which would probably put strain on the maintainers of WorldEdit).

The result of this is a new mod for Minetest which I've called WorldEditAdditions. Currently, it has over 35 additional commands (though by the time you read this that number has almost certainly grown!) and 2 handheld tools that extend the core feature set provided by WorldEdit, adding commands to do things like:

• Plant instant forests (//forest)
• Generate torus (i.e. doughnut) shapes (//torus)
• Simulate erosion (currently experimental, as I'm still tweaking the parameters) (//erode)
• Smooth terrain out (//convolve)
• Generate 2d and 3d mazes (//maze, //maze3d) - also responsible for my 3D mazes with Lua, OpenSCAD, and Blender blog post
• Scale regions up and down - even at the same time! (//scale)
• Run commands on areas that won't fit into memory all at the same time (//subdivide)

These are just a few of my favourites - I've implemented many more beyond those in this list. VorTechnix has also contributed a raft of improvements, from improvements to //torus to an entire suite of selection commands (//srect, //scol, //scube, and more), which has been an amazing experience to collaborate on an open-source project with someone on another continent (open-source is so cool like that).

A fundamental difference I decided on at the beginning when working of WorldEditAdditions was to split my new codebase into lots of loosely connected files, and have each file have a single purpose. If a files gets over 150 lines, then it's a candidate for being split up - for example every command has a backend (which sometimes itself spans multiple files, as in the case of //convolve and //erode) that actually manipulates the Minetest world and a front-end that handles the chat command parsing (this way we also get an API for free! Still working on documenting that properly though - if anyone knows of something like documentation for Lua please comment below). By doing this, I enable the codebase to scale in a way that the original WorldEdit codebase does not.

I've had a ton of fun so far implementing different commands and subsequently using them (it's so satisfying to see a new command finally working!), and they have already proved very useful in creative building. Evidently others think so too, as we've already had over 4800 downloads on ContentDB:

Given the enormous amount of work I and others have put into WorldEditAdditions and the level of polish it is now achieving (on par with my other big project Pepperminty Wiki, which I've blogged about before), recently I also built a website for it:

You can visit it here: https://worldeditadditions.mooncarrot.space/

I built the website with Eleventy, as I did with the Pepperminty Wiki website (blog post). My experience with Eleventy this time around was much more positive than last time - more on this in future blog post. For the observant, I did lift the fancy button code on the new WorldEditAdditions website from the Pepperminty Wiki website :D

The website has the number of functions:

• Explaining what WorldEditAdditions is
• Instructing people on how to install it
• Showing people how to use it
• Providing a central reference of commands

I think I covered all of these bases fairly well, but only time will tell how actual users find it (please comment below! It gives me a huge amount of motivation to continue working on stuff like this).

Several components of the WorldEditAdditions codebase deserve their own blog posts that have not yet got one - especially //erode and //convolve, so do look out for those at some point in the future.

Moving forwards with WorldEditAdditions, I want to bring it up to feature parity with Worldedit for Minecraft. I also have a number of cool and unique commands in mind I'm working on such as //noise (apply an arbitrary 2d noise function to the height of the terrain), //mathapply (execute another command, but only apply changes to the nodes whose coordinates result in a number greater than 0.5 when pushed through a given arbitrary mathematical expression - I've already started implementing a mathematical expression parser in Lua with a recursive-descent parser, but have run into difficulties with operator precedence), and exporting Minetest regions to obj files that can then be imported into Blender (a collaboration with @VorTechnix).

If WorldEditAdditions has caught your interest, you can get started by visiting the WorldEditAdditions website: https://worldeditadditions.mooncarrot.space/.

If you find it useful, please consider starring it on GitHub and leaving a review on ContentDB! If you run into difficulties, please open an issue and I'll help you out.