When comparing Minetest vs SpaceChem, the Slant community recommends SpaceChem for most people. In the question“What are the best educational games on PC?” SpaceChem is ranked 6th while Minetest is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose SpaceChem is:
In particular, abstraction and concurrent programming skills could be gleaned from the game as it uses broad techniques often used by computer programmers.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Easily customization through LUA mods
An easy to use lua API, and a large variety of existing modifications and games that can be downloaded and installed easily.
Pro Open Source
Pro Runs fast and clean
Runs on Low-End Hardware, runs Fast, Spartan on Memory.
Pro Cross platform
Can be played on Android, Linux, Windows, and macOS.
Pro Fewer griefers than Minecraft
The smaller community means fewer players, and that mean fewer griefers than on Minecraft.
Pro Built for plugins from the beginning
Pro It's Free
Pro Fun and thorough tutorial
There is a tutorial game that you can download that teaches you how to play Minetest in a fun and intuitive way. There are even collectable gems you can try to find in the tutorial.
Pro Could help with real life programming skills
In particular, abstraction and concurrent programming skills could be gleaned from the game as it uses broad techniques often used by computer programmers.
Pro Easy to learn, hard to master puzzle
Spacechem's mechanics are pretty simple to learn and only takes minutes to understand how the game works. Of course mastering the gameplay is a whole different matter.
Pro Allows for short or long play sessions
The gameplay allows for a player to come in and solve a single puzzle in a short amount of time or to sit and tinker with a puzzle for hours trying to devise the perfect solution and contraption. It all comes down to what one want to put into the game but the free form of the puzzle solving is what makes it great for anyones playstyle be it short or long.
Pro Light on the system
The system requirements are quite low at only requiring a 2Ghz processor, 1G of ram and 300MB of hard drive space. Basically this game should work on just about any computer from the last 10-15 years.
Pro Endless gameplay through user created solutions
An individual players choices of components, arrangements or factories used will result in completely different experiences and problems/puzzles when compared to another users experience. A truly individualized experience that expands the games replayability.
Cons
Con Lack of mobs
Yet mobs can be installed through mods or subgames. However, if the server is not optimized, these can make the game run slower.
Con Not much to do even with mods
All I do in the game is dig underground and mine the ore within the caves. There are no monsters to fight, dungeons to explore, or any leveling systems/progression mechanics to keep me playing.
Con No weather
There's no built-in weather. However, there are mods which add this feature and extend it far beyond what you might expect from basic weather.
Con Rips off Minecraft
And not very well either.
Con Certain graphics are really bad
Parts of the games's graphics and functionality are really bad. Mob mods or default mobs look like a 4 year old drew them. However, the devs seem to be slowly sweeping through these issues. Come back soon if you don't like what you see yet.
Con Server lags
Almost everything is done server side, so the game can feel very janky on some servers.
Con Minecraft mod ecosystem separate from Minetest
Minetest is obviously an opensource implementation of Minecraft but the only problem is all the mods made for Minecraft do not work in Minetest. They could have designed their clone in such a way say fix it at 1.7.10 forge so that you could load up forge mods straight up and have them work somewhat. There's so much great content for Minecraft that is completely lost and unusable in Minetest, however at this pace of developement, maybe that will change in the future.
Con Cannot be played on the Raspberry Pi
Con Annoying action-y 'boss' stages
At the end of each 'world', there is a boss stage in which you have to perform a unique task. This wouldn't be too bad, but in these levels, you can use blocks that you can activate in real time to change the way your program runs. This often means lots of manual work and a lot of padding to hit the buttons at the right time, which is unnecessary for a puzzle game (and, given that you cannot rewind, also stressful if your program is very tight). I would imagine that the best scores for these levels also overly abuse this feature to make solutions that would be almost impossible without use of macros, for instance.
Con Late game is difficult
In later levels some players may reach a point where the game has become too difficult or frustrating, which may discourage any more play time with the game.