Minetest is a prime example of the weakness of the open source community. A bunch of people want to "system dev" you a framework. Very few want, or is capabale of, designing you an actual finished game, at least in the open source context. Op's kid deserve better. The best I can suggest is 0AD.
https://play0ad.com/
It might require an actual computer though.
I suspect you don't have kids? Either way that is a hilarious recommendation, for a number of reasons.
If my kids asked to play Minecraft and I installed that game, it would be a bit like them asking for pancakes and serving them bran flakes and a grapefruit.
They're not even remotely similar games, and have wildly different levels of appropriateness for children -- though that obviously depends on parental preference.
In any case, there's not even a slight their friends are playing it, and that is probably the most important factor for most kids.
FWIW, my 5th grader read this comment and got actively agitated at the comparison. He adores Minetest and wanted to convey that he "has a great community to play with". Of course YMMV, but I thought his take was worth mentioning.
Just in case my comment wasn't clear: I think Minetest -> Minecraft is at least a fair comparison, even if there are some glaring omissions in Minetest.
My bran flakes -> pancakes statement wasn't referring to Minetest. I was referring to the Age of Empires clone the parent comment recommended instead of Minetest.
P.S. Kudos to the young one for being open minded and independent about alternatives in the face of heavily-marketed-and-heavily-peer-used things! I can tell they're already wise beyond their years =)
If we're discussing viability of Minecraft on lower-end hardware, jumping from the voxel sandbox genre into the RTS genre (especially as you point out higher hardware requirements) is quite a stretch.
Minetest is as much of an alternative to Minecraft as Linux is an alternative to Windows. It works for some people, it won't work for most. It's less polished, requires some assembly (choosing a modpack), etc. They're quite obviously different games (as I pointed out already). But you don't need a degree in computer science, it's just a game. You can click on "new world" and start exploring and building.
What most people comparing the two seem to forget about, is just how much of a shitshow Minecraft modding is - and you don't really want to run the game without mods like sodium+lithium or optifine, because of how horribly unoptimized it is. I definitely prefer the Minecraft experience overall, but the game would've been completely unplayable on M1 Macs without tremendous community effort, whereas Minetest runs smoothly on a 12yro laptop with zero tweaking.
