[hedgehog]

Luanti with Mineclonia plug-in works well if you are willing to move entirely to Mac/Windows/Linux clients. The whole stack is open source so it's easier to make changes etc if you want. No hacky binary patching of Java bytecode. Originally I was going to try Minecraft proper first since I'd already paid for that, but Microsoft doesn't honor old licenses and in the end the Luanti path probably works better.

https://content.luanti.org/packages/ryvnf/mineclonia/

[mghackerlady]

I love Luanti. Is it as good as minecraft? No, not really, but I appreciate it's existence, if not for a non-hacky BSD minecraft experience (You can run java edition on *BSD from what I've seen, but ymmv as I've personally never tried)

[hedgehog]

For our purposes it has the mining/crafting/construction bits the kids care about so in that dimension there's no difference. From my perspective it's been simple to operate, and having all the source makes a good base for building tools and mods (some new pet/creature entities, simplified launcher, screenshot tools).