Development Tools

This article lists various free software tools which help in development of Minetest and mods for Minetest.

Minetest development

NodeBoxEditor: Build node boxes by dragging their edges.
MTS Editor: A program to create, view and edit Minetest schematics, but it supports other file formats (e.g. Minecraft schematics) as well
Schematic Creator: A Java program to create schematics
Model Creator: A Java program to create meshes
RocketLib Toolkit: Lua-based SQLite3 map reader
luacheck: Lua linter and static code analyser (see also the chapter rubenwardy's modding book)
busted: Lua unit testing framework (see also the chapter rubenwardy's modding book)

Formspec Editor: A very simple tool (in the form of a "game") which lets you edit a formspec file in a text editor and it will be shown in Minetest in real time

LuaCmd [luacmd]: luacmd server command which allows you to run a single Lua statement
QA-Block [qa_block]: Adds a Quality Assurance block which you use to run various checker scripts like listing items with missing description (including your own) and browse the global Lua namespace
DevToys: Modpacks with lots of example nodes (for testing engine features) and a few tools to manipulate nodes
Nodebox Creator [nodebox_creator]: Ingame nodebox editor

L-System Tree Utility [ltool]: Helps you creating L-system trees which you can spawn with minetest.spawn_tree
Schematic Editor [schemedit]: Advanced tool for creating and placing schematics
Convert table schematic to .mts [saveschems]: Tool for converting schematics from Lua table format to MTS files
WorldEdit: Primarily a tool for editing large parts of the world, what's interesting for developers is that it includes a few basic schematic commands (//mtschemcreate, etc.)

Perlin Explorer [perlin_explorer]: Tweak, explore, analyze and visualize 2D and 3D Perlin noises
Prysm Viewer Mod [prysm]: Test 1D Perlin noise on-the-fly

List Items [listitems]: Server commands for listing and searching the IDs of registered items and entities
Find Biome [findbiome]: Server command for finding a biome and teleporting to it
Inventory Check [inventorycheck]: Investigate the inventory of any player
Inspector [inspector]: Reveal the item/entity definition, metadata and param1/param2 of whatever you punch
Advanced Rangefinder [finder]: Adds search capabilities for both nodes and entities and related server commands

Stopwatch [stopwatch]: Benchmarking utility to quickly benchmark portions of Lua code

Minetest Formspec Editor: A great online tool with drag and drop that allows you to import and export formspecs in different versions
Perlin noise tuner Visualizes 2D Perlin noise that Minetest will generate with different noiseparams. (Emulation of Minetest Perlin noise can be wrong in extremes/edge-cases due to precision of JavaScript number type)