Modding Intro

Language:	[[::Modding Intro|English]]

Minetest has a scripting API (Application Programming Interface), which is used to program mods (short for "modifications") for the game, extending its features and adding new items. This API is accessed using an easy-to-use programming language called Lua. More specifically, the version of Lua is 5.1 (Reference manual, book “Programming in Lua”).

The only thing you will need is basic programming knowledge. If you don't have any programming experience, look aroud in the Internet for tutorials or read Programming in Lua here (note: only for Lua 5.0, but it's still mostly true).

Documentation

The only official Lua API documentation is lua_api.txt. You can find this file in your Minetest installation, in the doc directory. Use this file to look up functions, core features of the Lua API, etc. This file is maintained by the core developers of Minetest and every change to it goes through a quality control process. This document explains everything you need to know about the Lua API in concise form, but may be daunting for newbies to read. There is also (as of april 2020) a automatically generated version that might be easier to read.

For complete beginners, there's also an unofficial guide/tutorial into Lua scripting: The Minetest Modding Online Tutorial Book. It also includes a HTML version of lua_api.txt which is more readable.

A very basic overview is written in Modding Overview.

WARNING: A huge amount of pages on this wiki regarding Lua methods and objects are extremely outdated. Ignore them for now, use lua_api.txt instead. It has been proposed to remove those pages as redundant.

Other useful links

• Check out the Mod Releases forum to see mods that have been published by the community.
• Get mod help from the modding questions thread.
• Suggest a mod idea in the mod request thread.