FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

Hi, I just played minetest for the first time yesterday. I've played minecraft before, but I don't know how to get wood from trees, etc. Often when I start chopping at a tree the block dissappears but I don't get a piece of wood in my inventory.

Welcome to Minetest!
When you are playing on a server and you dont get a peice of tree block, it usually means it is protected or you do not have build priveleges, since you are a new player, i am going to assume that you do not have building priveleges, find the server that you play on's topic and say something like this:
"Hello i would like Building Priveleges, My Ingame name is r_david, i have also set my password (It is reccomended that you set a password) I reccomend playing singleplayer for a while to get to know how the game works.

Uh, hey!

Like Josh said, if you're playing online, you probably should request interact privs on their topics- although there are freebuild servers you can choose from, as well (uplink.io, for one).

Also, as Josh said, you should spend a bit of time in singleplayer to get a feel for how the game works. This is actually the best part of minetest- you can modify the game to suit your needs by means of.... wait for it.... mod(ule)s! Some mods add helicopters, boats, beds, mobs and a temple, and an entire wildlife ecosystem, with traders and all. There area also mods by paramat which add different realms, canyons, rivers, mountains and other details. It's a wild world!

Of course, when you play online, you're at the mercy of whoever's running the server. Still, online is one of the more fun things to do- and with Minetest, any player can also host their own server. We're mostly decentralized, except for the master server list, but even that is easy to fix: direct ip!

If you like Minecraft then you might want to try MiniTest.