Minecraft 1.20 5

[Frida Kosofsky]

Today we are shipping Minecraft: Java Edition 1.20.5, also known as the Armored Paws drop! Travel to the Savanna and Badlands biomes and say hello to the endearing Armadillos. Find and befriend eight new Wolf variants and equip your canine companions with dyable armor made from Armadillo Scutes and go adventuring together!

On the technical side, the Armored Paws drop is also introducing a change to how Java Edition spawn chunks work, the details of which we covered in the changelog for Snapshot 24w03a earlier this year. The tl;dr version of this change is that we're making the spawn chunk radius a configurable game rule and decreasing the default value by 98%. This should translate to a noticeable performance boost for most players!

We do however believe that this builds critical foundations for future extensibility. We have taken care to ship these changes all at once, with the hope that this avoids future incremental changes requiring many small updates to packs.

The current NBT 'tag' has existed for quite some time, and we are aware that a lot of clever techniques have been developed with this for commands and data packs. Over the course of the snapshot series, we have hugely appreciated your feedback on these changes, allowing us to avoid (often undocumented) functionality being lost without suitable alternatives.

These are item stack components that replace existing functionality that was formerly specified in item NBT.All commands and data definitions will need to be upgraded to use these formats. Items in-world will however be automatically upgraded.

The following changes only apply when their respective Experiment is turned on, either by activating the corresponding experimental data pack or by turning it on in the Experiments screen while creating the world.

We're now releasing 1.20.2 for Minecraft: Java Edition. This release comes with more diamond ore in the deep regions of the world and changes to mob attack reach as well as optimizations to the game's networking performance enabling smoother online play even on low-bandwidth connections.

With 1.20.2, we are making some important updates to our Player Reporting Tool to better protect the online safety of our players. You will now be able to report player skins and usernames that violate our Community Standards.

Playing Minecraft should be an inclusive and safe experience for everyone, which is why alongside in-game chat messages, you will now be able to report player skins and usernames that violate our Community Standards in Java Edition.

Just like with chat reports, nothing is automated. Any reported skin or username will be reviewed manually by a team of trained Minecraft moderators, who will use the submitted evidence to decide whether the skin and/or username is in breach of our Community Standards. Skins that are in violation of these standards will be removed from Minecraft and will no longer be accessible for use by any player. Usernames that are in violation of these standards will need to be changed before that player can play online via a shared server or Realm; though single player mode will still be accessible. To find out more about this and other safety policies, including more detail on the suspension procedure, appeals process, and how we handle malicious or repeat reporting, please visit our dedicated FAQ page.

The calculations to determine whether a mob can attack a player or other mobs have been changed. Previously a mob's horizontal width was used to determine their attack reach and their height had no effect. The area where a mob can attack is now their bounding box extended in horizontal directions.

The Multiplayer mode of the game has been optimized to enable more fluid online play. If you have previously experienced disconnections or slow loading into online servers, this version may significantly improve that experience.

A new command for randomizing values and controlling random sequences. The value and roll forms can be used to draw a random value. In the case of roll, the resulting value is also shown in chat for all players.

Regular commands (non-macro lines) are still pre-parsed. Only commands with variable substitutions in them are parsed when a macro is called and the game will attempt to cache the result of a certain parameter set being used in a call.

This makes repeated calls with the same parameter set cheaper than new calls with different parameters, but an overhead still remains compared to regular functions. Note that only the values references by macro as parameters are included in this cache, so any extra data in the provided compound is ignored.

This data pack version removes the execute if function and return run functionality that existed for a time during the development of this version. Flaws with those commands (see bugs MC-264595, MC-264699 and MC-264710) require some substantial changes to fix, which we do not want to make close to a release.

It however does not load into the game. The log shows the following error[Render thread/ERROR] [minecraft/RecipeManager]: Parsing error loading recipe itemsplus:emerald_stick_from_crafting_table com.google.gson.JsonParseException: No key id in MapLike["item":"itemsplus:emerald_stick","count":1]

Overall, it seems like a shame that in my humble opinion, Minecraft should end development by 1.20, but the truth is, lots of my friends like Ryan and Mason have permanently moved on from Minecraft, and have not looked back since. This is because they've seen similar issues with the game besides what I just told y'all about, and I'd have to agree with them wholeheartedly.

I know it's to help prevent people from pirating or cracking the game for free
Ironically, you don't even need to mod the actual game to pirate it - the launcher itself is what actually enforces it, either by adding a "-demo" parameter to the game if you haven't bought it (fun fact: versions prior to 1.3 do not recognize this so they actually allow you to play the full game - as even documented on the Wiki - all "cracked" launchers need to do is omit this to allow any version to be played in non-demo mode).

As for the server itself, it is entirely free to download (as all the game files are, actually - just check out , which directly links to the files on Mojang's servers) - and there is actually a setting which lets you disable online authentication - which is all a "cracked" server actually is, and is also clearly documented on the Wiki, and elsewhere (why Mojang hasn't removed such an easily exploited setting is beyond me, I've heard it is so server admins can get on in the event they can't normally login for some reason; as for pre-1.3 versions, they may just not care since they are so outdated they may as well be a stripped-down demo version, otherwise, they could just prevent you from changing versions if you have a demo account):
_Mode#Trivia

If one tries to play a demo version before 1.3 from the launcher using a non-premium account, they can play the full version. This is because 1.3 is the version that added the demo mode to Minecraft, so earlier versions do not have the code necessary to recognize that they are in the demo.

online-mode

Setting this variable to off purposely is called "cracking" a server, and servers that are present with online mode off are called "cracked" servers, allowing players with unlicensed copies of Minecraft to join.


Thus, obfuscation literally does nothing at all to secure the game against unlicensed usage. My main issue with it is that it makes (vanilla) crash reports impossible to understand unless you have access to deobfuscation mappings, or somebody else had figured out what the issue is, or the error message is clear enough; what does this even mean (division by zero - but where? What is "bit.b"?)
java.lang.ArithmeticException: / by zero
at blt.b(SourceFile:814)
at bao.ak(SourceFile:801)
at bao.f(SourceFile:728)
at net.minecraft.client.main.Main.main(SourceFile:148)

-edition-support/3174955-minecraft-version-1-7-10-keeps-crashing-when-i
Otherwise, it hasn't bothered me since I simply stopped updating at 1.6.4, with everything after that basically a separate game (if you consider how I version my own mods, based on major updates to world generation, 1.0.0-1.6.4 would be "Minecraft 1.0", 1.7-1.17 is "Minecraft 2.0", and 1.18+ is "Minecraft 3.0"), so there is no issue with having to update mods, which also must be updated because of internal changes to the game's code; the main reason why so many mods stopped updating at or were slow to update past 1.7.10 is not because of obfuscation but because of major internal changes, same for 1.13.

Also, I don't think it is correct to call Minecraft an "indie" game anymore, it hasn't been developed by a single person for well over a decade (there is a subset of players who consider versions up to Beta 1.7.3, when Notch was still dominant, "golden age", with everything since then going in a completely different direction from its original vision). Others consider the Microsoft buyout to be the end of the indie era; by this measure 1.8 was the last "indie" version (though I'd put it at 1.7 at the latest due to major changes in how the game is coded since 1.8).

TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?

You say Mojang is an indie company. I disagree with this. It's not quite indie anymore. Mojang and Riot are two examples that may have both been indie companies at the start of the 2010s, but not really anymore. In fact, one of the one things you state in the same point is the slow pace of content/change over time, and the company becoming larger, having been bought out by a parent company, and having its processes shift is a result of this growth. That's a separate subject on its own, but company size does not linearly equal rate of change potential.

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