Minetest is awesome. It is a lot of fun to play with kids on LAN. We played countless hours on the base game only and then there are tons of mods.

I played Minetest a lot with my kids too. We still have tons of those old maps from our co-op on various computers.

Now that they are playing other games, I still find that I occasionally log into Minetest servers just to look around at all the amazing builds.

In one of them I found a working MS Paint emulator (a wall with the icons and canvas on it), as well as a very impressive and huge ancient Greek temple.

Minetest is kinda crap, honestly. Unless it has radically changed since I played it, the game feel is just lightyears behind.

It has lots of mods and customization hooks, way more than Minecraft, and if that works for you that's great. But for a lot of people the experience just can't compare.

the good thing about minetest is that it runs on a raspberry pi 400 with acceptable framerate, better then minecraft.

there is a minecraft mod in minetest: https://content.minetest.net/packages/Wuzzy/mineclone2/

Yeah, I tried those mods when I tried Minetest. Still wasn't remotely comparable.

Basic things like the hand animation when breaking blocks were subtly worse. Monsters didn't have AI or pathfinding or animations. Etc.

Is there any well-documented configuration of Minetest that provides as much fun as Minecraft?

I think what you are looking for is the MineClone2 game for MineTest. It is basically a recreation of the Minecraft mobs, items, realms, etc in MineTest. I have played it a lot and it is great if you are looking for the MC experience!

https://content.minetest.net/packages/Wuzzy/mineclone2/

as much fun is very subjective.

there are hundreds of add-ons enabling various features.

which minecraft features in particular are you thinking of?

Just in general, that there's a lot of stuff to do. I can make a base and slowly do various upgrades, try to finish the game as quickly as possible, or just fool around in creative mode.

that sounds like no different than minetest.

myself i only play minetest on a public server without attacking mobs, so there is no hurry to build a base, and i can focus on building interesting stuff. i still have to get food, mine for materials and fix my tools so there is plenty to manage while building. and with other players on the server we can also build in collaboration.

my son likes to add mobs, so he is building and fighting mobs.