When comparing Minetest vs Angband, the Slant community recommends Minetest for most people. In the question“What are the best open-source games?” Minetest is ranked 13th while Angband is ranked 51st. The most important reason people chose Minetest is:
An easy to use lua API, and a large variety of existing modifications and games that can be downloaded and installed easily.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
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 Active development
Angband contributors are still improving the core gameplay almost 30 years later.
Pro Classic Roguelike that has inspired many variants
Throughout the years many people have created their own variants on the game. Making for a wide selection of choices in gameplay and themes while still holding to the core design of the game.
Pro Challenging
Angband is a very difficult roguelike game with permadeath, meaning that all your progress is destroyed when you die. Most Angband players don't fully beat the game until months or years later (if at all). However, the game still tracks your progress and scores even if you don't win, so it's fun and challenging regardless.
Pro Crossplatform
Linux / Mac / Windows support.
Pro Addicting
Pro High replay value
Each play through has the potential to be a different experience.
Pro Simple character creation
Pro Vast community of players
You can easily find tips and help online, about monsters, items, gameplay, etc...
Pro Deep gameplay
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.