Silver sand sits on our map in eleven places. Anyone who wanted to build more out of silver sand was out of luck: the world generator behind our map never created silver sand, and no recipe for making it existed. Eleven blocks, and that was it. Since version 2.5.0 of 21 October 2026, a different sentence holds: eight sand plus a silver ingot makes eight silver sand — and more importantly, no similar case will ever slip through unnoticed again. Everything in the game is now either on the map, craftable, dug out of the world, obtainable from a machine, or carries a human verdict explaining why it is out of reach. And a new set of automatic checks guards that promise on every push.
The first part of our story told how a five-year-old world moved from Minetest 5.4.1 to the Luanti 5.17.0 engine without losing a single block. The second part covered version 2.0.0 of 14 October 2026: 108 new mods, roughly 1,500 new recipes, and one honestly measured ceiling — the list of all in-game nodes had grown to 35,590, and no more would fit. This third part is about what happened in the seven days after — plus one day later: version 2.0.1 of 16 October, version 2.5.0 of 21 October, and an epilogue from 22 October (versions 2.5.1 and 2.5.2). No new content. Just fixes — but fixes at a pace and with a systematicity worth writing about. For players: what you can newly craft and what stopped misbehaving. For admins and developers: how we work when an AI agent holds full access to the testing server and a set of gates checks every change. Every number in this article is measured from the repository and the release notes, never estimated.
A Week, Two Releases: Steel First, Then Everything Else
Version 2.0.1 arrived two days after the two-oh and fixed a single thing, but fixed it properly: steel ingots smelt from iron lumps in the furnace again, the way players know it from the base game. The pigiron mod had silently deleted the original vanilla recipe and replaced it with its own iron ingot — a classic collision, one the player only notices when something other than expected drops out of the furnace. The fix restored the vanilla path, and pigiron’s iron ingot is now grid-crafted from lump and coal. The first attempt used pigiron charcoal, but its furnace path is shadowed by the charcoal mod — a trap in the form of an ingredient the player would never see in the furnace. Milan spotted it during his own gameplay, and the fix was reworked to plain dug coal the same day. That is our development cycle: a report from real gameplay in the morning, a fix by the evening.
Version 2.5.0 of 21 October is the culmination of the week: according to the release notes, 51 commits, 85 files and 66 patches on top of upstream code, every one of them verified by running on the testing server. No new mod — the mod list stayed at 481 enabled rows including modpack subparts, and the node count moved by exactly one, to 35,591. This version adds nothing. It maintains.
What You Could Not Craft Before and Can Now
The player-facing half of version 2.5.0 is rescue recipes — honest crafting paths for things that existed in the game but could not be obtained. Silver sand is only the prettiest example: eight plain sand plus a silver ingot makes eight silver sand. Boats and bus cabins with indistinguishable recipes got the same treatment, jukebox discs 2 through 9 (crafted from the first disc plus dye), tea and coffee with milk from our cows, A-through-C doors and doors by the my_* and ts_doors authors, standing lamps, ceilings, a fire extinguisher, coloured bricks and floors. Builders will appreciate sixty colour variants of myglass glass, fifteen shades of lpanes panels remapped onto live dyes, and aliases for girder truss structures. And one table almost lost its way back: its reverse recipe shared the crafting pattern with another product, so only one of them could ever work. A single extra stick fixed it, honestly documented as joinery.
The kitchen deserves its own paragraph. Some recipes newly return their containers and leftovers, the way a player would expect: sea salt returns the bucket, sugar returns molasses, tomato returns seeds, louvers return scissors. And there was cleaning up, too: dead recipes crafting nonexistent things (door number 6, for instance) are gone, along with recipes for admin-only track layers. Lemonade and orange juice stayed dead — the pack contains no fruit — and were hidden from the creative inventory so they stop tempting players. The flashlight battery stayed dead because nothing consumes it, and the airship stayed creative-only — a deliberate decision by its maintainer. Every such verdict is written down in a human-readable list, not buried in code.
Behind these recipes sits an invisible mechanic worth understanding: when two mods smelt the same thing in the furnace, the engine silently picks whichever loaded first — first come, first served. That is why wood smelts into charcoal from the charcoal set (it loaded first, pigiron lost out), why the bucket of water belongs to the bbq set for salt, and why clay fires into natural baked clay while multidecor plaster is grid-crafted instead. The player never sees this contest — only its outcome, when the furnace yields something other than expected. That is exactly why every such contest has a named winner in our recipe contract, with a replacement path for the loser.
Three Chairs You Could Not Sit On
The most entertaining chapter of the week is about sitting — a detective story in three reported bugs. The bench_n_stuff bench seated the camera a head lower than it should: the seat put the view at lap level instead of eye level while the player’s body stayed correct. The xdecor chair was even worse off: its camera started in the lap. And the multidecor armchairs, sofa and bathtub did two things at once: in half the cases they stood the character up on sitting down (a standing frame had slipped into the sitting animation list and was picked at random), and the player’s armour disappeared on sitting (the mod swapped the whole player model when sitting).
The fixes went to the roots. The bench and the chair got correct camera heights, and multidecor moved to native sitting with no model swapping — the pattern taken from the working bench — so the armour stays where it belongs. And because the same bugs could be hiding in dozens of other furniture pieces, two new checks were born: one reviews every nonzero camera setting in mod code and requires a human verdict on it, the other registers every seat in the game including a verdict from a real in-game test (the bench was sit-tested on release day). A parting bonus: after closing the info window, the unread-mail notice reappears — it used to vanish silently.
Gates Instead of Promises: How the Machine Guards
And now the part for server admins and developers, because it is the most interesting thing about the whole arrangement. Our repository holds not just the game but a set of automatic checks — gates — that verify every change before it may be pushed. The pre-push hook is uncompromising: a failing gate means the change never reaches the server. Version 2.5.0 added seven gates and extended two older ones:
- the stranded-items check: everything in the game must be on the map, craftable, dug out of the world, or obtainable from a machine. It started at roughly two hundred findings and ends at zero;
- the geometric-duplicates check: a single crafting pattern may have exactly one winner;
- the machine-recipes check: tubelib grinders and machines invisible to the regular recipe dump;
- the our-recipes check: all 1,573 of our own recipes tracked, none unwatched;
- the furnace-shadow check: three cases where two mods smelt the same thing and the furnace always lets only one win (charcoal, salt, baked clay);
- the sitting check: the lesson of the chair chapter — every camera setting in mod code goes through human review;
- the seat registry: every seat in the game including a verdict from a real gameplay test (the bench was sit-tested on release day);
- the extended closure check: every ingredient of every new recipe must be craftable or carry a human verdict — including state variants and empty groups;
- the drop registry: 286 records of what drops from what.
Behind every row sits human work, not just the machine: 257 obtainability verdicts passed one-by-one manual verification against the code, and every undecided input blocks the whole refresh until Milan personally confirms it. The machine guards, the human decides.
The recipe preservation from version 2.0.1 belongs here, too: every foreign attempt to delete a recipe needs a row in the allowlist, and the vanilla game keeps its own 104-row baseline that independently rediscovers the steel loss. The biggest advantage of the whole arrangement is organisational, not technical after all: the minetest-developer AI agent holds full access to the devel-testing server — a faithful copy of production — and runs and measures every fix there live. The only inputs it needs are real players’ reports and experience plus the comments of Milan, the server admin. It gets everything else itself — dumps from the running server, diffs against the baseline, gameplay tests.
Nine Million Blocks and Zero Unknowns
The final trial of version 2.5.0 ran on production data: a copy of the live map with 9,259,947 blocks. Booting on the production map: zero errors, zero mod crashes. A full map scan: zero broken blocks and zero truly unknown names — two names on the map are covered by valid aliases, and all nine unknown inventory names are covered by aliases, three of them newly added in this very version. The runtime registries after all fixes report 58,812 recipes, 37,680 items and 35,591 nodes. That is not a claim, that is a measurement log.
And what did not change matters as much as what did: the engine stayed Luanti 5.17.0, minetest_game at revision c42e4d0c, and the mod list at 481 enabled rows. Pin stability — every upstream version locked in the version list — means what works today will keep running after the next deploy.
One Day Later: The Crash Caused by Two Correct Things
Version 2.5.1 of 22 October 2026 is purely documentary: a more readable README with a quick start, and tidied-up licensing — the text now states out loud that the free WTFPL licence covers only our own work (scripts, patches, mm_compat, mm_info, documentation), while the mods and the game keep their authors’ licences, which always apply. Both of our mods now declare it in their mod.conf as well, and a forgotten texture attribution (CC BY-SA 4.0, Shara RedCat) has been added. No code, no gameplay change — a safe pull.
Version 2.5.2 from the same day is a detective story with a server crash. Loading a map block with a kitchen cabinet crashed the server on an unknown node, homedecor:kitchen_cabinet_colorable_colorable — note the doubled suffix. The cause is an interplay of two individually correct changes: an old cabinet migration that runs on every load (so that even pre-2016 cabinets convert) blindly rewrites “_cabinet” to “_cabinet_colorable” — while the alias from our production-map scan had meanwhile pointed the old names at already-converted cabinets. The second pass glued the suffix on twice, and the engine crashed on a nonexistent node. The fix is a guard of a few lines: already-converted cabinets are skipped, genuinely old ones keep migrating. Verified in game and by machine: 12 out of 12 old names migrate, 26 out of 26 converted ones are skipped, boot with zero errors. And the deployment? Just pull, sync and restart — the map and the database stay untouched.
Come Sit Down — This Time at the Right Height
The public server list showed us three times on 22 October 2026, always on engine 5.17.0: the main world at my-web.xyz, port 30001, the creative world at port 30003 and the devel world at port 30002 — each for 40 players. Registration is open, the rules live in the in-game info mod, and the recipe guide with them. Come craft silver sand, brew tea with milk from our cows, play disc number 7 and sit down on the bench — the camera is where it belongs now. And if you run into something that cannot be crafted, tell us: reports like that feed the next version.
Sources
- minetest-mm repository — https://git.my-web.xyz/milan/minetest-mm
- v2.5.0 release notes — https://git.my-web.xyz/milan/minetest-mm/releases/tag/v2.5.0
- v2.0.1 release notes (the steel fix) — https://git.my-web.xyz/milan/minetest-mm/releases/tag/v2.0.1
- v2.5.1 release notes (docs and licences) — https://git.my-web.xyz/milan/minetest-mm/releases/tag/v2.5.1
- v2.5.2 release notes (the crash fix, issue #53) — https://git.my-web.xyz/milan/minetest-mm/releases/tag/v2.5.2
- Player-facing recipe contract (RECIPE_CHANGES.md) — https://git.my-web.xyz/milan/minetest-mm/src/branch/master/docs/RECIPE_CHANGES.md
- Luanti, the open-source voxel engine — https://www.luanti.org/
- Public server list (our three worlds on engine 5.17.0, state of 22 Oct 2026) — https://servers.luanti.org/
- How an AI Agent Upgraded a Five-Year Blocky World (part one) — https://www.limdem.io/how-an-ai-agent-upgraded-a-five-year-blocky-world-from-minetest-5-4-to-luanti-5-17-without-losing-a-block/
- Luanti Without Losing a Block, Part Two (version 2.0.0) — https://www.limdem.io/luanti-without-losing-a-block-part-two-what-v2-0-0-brought-and-why-no-more-nodes-fit/
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