Minecraft: Java Edition has been obfuscated since its release. This obfuscation meant that people couldn’t see our source code. Instead, everything was scrambled – and those who wanted to mod Java Edition had to try and piece together what every class and function in the code did.
Modding is at the heart of Java Edition – and obfuscation makes modding harder. We’re excited about this change to remove obfuscation, as it should make it quicker and easier for modders to create and improve mods. Now you won’t have to untangle tricky code or deal with unclear names. What’s more, de-bugging will become more straightforward, and crash logs will actually be readable!
surprisingly fantastic and consumer friendly move from mojang, good on them
I like to think that Luanti caused this.
Started experimenting with modding Luanti just last week. Was realy suprised how accesable and easy it is, even for an idiot with no experience like me!
When I’m finished with my current game (a 2D platform-adventure game made in Godot) I’m thinking of prototyping my next game in Luanti. It’ll let me experiment with ideas for a large, open-world game without needing to implement my own world-generation system and, since everything is block-based and the expected graphical fidelity is low, it’ll make creating the content a lot easier.
I have been playing re-console mod pack lately because I prefer 4J’s version of Minecraft the most.
Oh, wow. Just reading the title made me really excited about this.
I don’t really care what their incentive for this was, it’s a good move for the community.
Why not go open source? What are they so afraid of, given anyone can now see the source code by using a simple tool?
I doubt that, but going source available is more likely imo.
Open source includes unlimited distribution. The game is still paid and they want to reserve distribution rights.
To add to this, it’s exclusively available on the Microsoft Store, which has gotten so bad lately that I refused the terms on their most recent update and haven’t had it installed on any machines since.
It isn’t? Minecraft: Java Edition (which is getting deobfuscated) is available on their website for Windows, MacOS and Linux. Minecraft: Bedrock Edition has nothing to do with these news.
I could be mistaken but I’m 90% sure the website redirects you to buy it on the Microsoft Store, which is also how it will be installed and launched.
No it isn’t. On Windows there are two versions of Minecraft. “Minecraft: Bedrock Edition” available as a UWP using the Microsoft Store, written in C++ and supporting crossplay with the Minecraft releases for consoles and mobile phones and “Minecraft: Java Edition” available through minecraft.net, written in Java and supporting crossplay with the MacOS and Linux versions.
The Java and Bedrock edition came bundled together for me. Maybe theres a way to redeem it somewhere other than the store, but I am still pretty sure its been the way I described ever since Minecraft was purchased by Microsoft.
Here’s the link to the MSI for Minecraft Java: https://aka.ms/minecraftClientWindows
You can use the same license for both, and your purchase includes access to both versions regardless of how you buy it, unless that’s changed very recently when I wasn’t looking.
Officially, both versions also explicitly require you to create (or already have) a Microsoft account to sign-in and play. Unofficially, the Java version is dead easy to pirate.
Open-source and source-available are used interchangeably. Releasing the source does not mean the license will allow any form of redistribution or recompilation.
If you decompile the game yourself you can infinitely distribute the game as well. This is not an argument.
Removed by mod
The comment said why not go open source, not why not go source available though.
Open source and source available are not and cannot be used interchangeably. They mean two extremely different things!
Do you mean source available or actually open source?
I mean releasing the source under a license like GPL (or whatever the modern equivalent is).
I’d love to see that but realistically I don’t ever see it happening.
Because then anyone could fork it and redistribute the game which I presume they don’t want.
It would be sweet for us if they did, but I can see why they don’t want to do that.
Things like Minetest exist.
Yes, but Minetest/Luanti is not a fork of Minecraft, it is its own separate thing.
Precisely.
They could distribute source ports of the game, but you’d still have to buy the game in order to make use of them. Textures, sound effects, animations, etc. are (usually) not source code.
That’s why people still buy Doom 2 even though it was open-sourced in 1997.
The small amount of sales of doom 2 today is not at all comparable to the massive amount of minecraft sales and minecraft-related microtransactions that microsoft is raking in. Doom has many modern sequels that are far more popular today than doom 2, while minecraft does not have any official sequel.
And Hytale got shitcanned!
It’s actually amazing that in an industry so hell-bent on copying successful formulas ad-nauseam (e.g. Quake&Doom spawning the whole genre of First Person Shooters), Minecraft has not seen anything reach the status of spiritual successor in over 15 years of charts-topping sales performance. Not from its own studio, not from its former creator, not with the Late Hypixel Studios.
There are survival games and base-building games and exploration games, but none of them are “Minecraft-likes” in the way that early FPS were “Quake-likes”. CS has Valorant. LoL has Dota. Tekken has Street Fighter. PUBG has Fortnite has Roblox. Minecraft somehow remains truly one-of-a-kind, a gaming UFO that eludes suits looking for a replicable formula. I actually believe Mojang themselves don’t understand why Minecraft works in the first place either, which is why every update seemingly either underwhelms or angers everyone. That game is lightning in a bottle and no-one knows what to do with it.
If Nadella had a stroke so bad he decided to make Minecraft FOSS, I’d be really interested to see what would happen. If any for-profit company was allowed to make direct Minecraft derivatives, I do think we would see a level of creativity and innovation that would dwarf even the already extremely prolific current modding scene.
Open-sourcing Doom increased, rather than decreased sales.
Doom also went open source long before there were any sequels, and while it was still the hottest shit in PC gaming.
What proportion of those sales are for Java edition? This sounds like an attempt to make mods and therefore java edition into a more popular/appealing product. They know that most users are not going to do anything with source code.
I thought they were still hoping to convince people to use Bedrock so they had to buy Windows.
Fork it and use your own texture and sound pack doesn’t sound like much work tbh. Any major modpack could just redistribute the game as a fork and it would be awesome. But Microsoft probably don’t want that.
So, what’s the catch? Surely Microsoft and Mojang didn’t just suddenly become good?
Luanti eating on their turf.
I doubt microsoft even knows what luanti is
Whats that?
It’s the platform that used to be MineTest, apparently
Lol no
I would advance: trying to keep the brand alive against the hidden giant of Roblox.
The monkeypaw says they will stop updates for the java edition or release a new version that doesn’t work on the java edition.
They probably see how many sales are generated from the free work done by modders though. If someone wants to come along and do for free the thing you might have to actually pay designers, developers, artists and all the support staff for and they still need to pay you to play it, you’d be foolish not to encourage the exploitation of free labor.
Young generations and mobile players are on bedrock
Everyone else plays Java where you can easily self-host a server
Or a Bethesda style creation club is coming.
They already do that for bedrock.
Complete with microtransactions and a horrible lack of customizability! Seriously I just wanted to play some Minecraft in RTX but you literally can’t use the nVidia RTX stuff outside of the demo maps, otherwise you have to purchase a different texture pack with real money. And basically everything in the Bedrock Marketplace costs real money, and very little is free.
Meanwhile Java edition doesn’t have any paid content in part because the original Minecraft license specified anyone was free to make mods and custom content but were explicitly restricted from charging money for it
Call me ignorant, if this happened and it brought a new golden era of modding (1.7.10 style) where everyone’s playing the same version I’d be maybe the happiest player ever.
Modders backporting content is nothing new, hell, they even brought the mobs that didn’t make the cut from those stupid mob votes to life.
Let modding become the new updates, fuck it. At this point they’d likely be better realised than Microsoft’s efforts.1.7.10
Y’all can try and pull it from my cold, dead hands.
I should boot up the ol modpack and see what it do—oh, right, it crashes 🥹
I was thinking the same thing. If the de-obfuscation tools are already out there, it might cost them more money to keep that layer. Their developers also have to use it to read the crash logs and the like from the sounds of it. Less layers = less maintenance = less cost. More mods = keeps the game relevant.
If that happens, the modding scene would boom incredibly
And you’d have some smart nerds who take it upon them to keep updating the game much better than Mojang ever could.
It would become open source almost
It’s a 20 year old game going into abandonware mode. This is the nicest way for them to do that.
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Its 16, not 20, the earliest version “Cave Game Tech Test” was in May 2009.
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They’re still actively pushing updates, a really big one is scheduled for the holiday season. Additional biomes and mini-bosses were added last year with structures hinting at development plans for a 4th dimension. The lighting engine is being actively redone.
Minecraft is absolutely not gearing down into abandonware mode.
And they finally added copper items 😂
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I guess it just doesn’t make sense to obfuscate it when mods in general runs the Minecraft community in turn making more profit to Mojang/Microsoft. My other suspicion is potential competition. There is this game called Vintage Story which kinda directly competes with Minecraft seems gaining ground and was built to be moddable from the start.
Exactly. Community bindings do exist and are used over the official bindings already, and I think the source code obfuscation is just an annoyance by now.
I wonder how good AI is at deobfuscating code. It seems like the kind of thing it might be good at.
With how bad it is at writing it, I’m guessing similarly bad. It’ll do something, but odds are it introduces a ton of errors that you then have to track down. That’s the best case. Worst case, it just creates something totally different that looks similar to the input but doesn’t do the same thing.
Havent they been making changes to help mod/datapack development for a while?
Modding is such a big part of the game, helping it would get more people playing the game
They made “datapack” which is a way of playing with mods without having to use third-party mod loaders like Forge and Fabric but (don’t quote me on this as I’m not a mod developer) it’s not as powerful compare to the mod loaders.
Yup. Mods can change basically EVERYTHING, compared to datapacks being able to change only what mojang wants.
Not sure if it’s just what they want, it’s mostly that Minecraft’s spaghetti code had a lot of things hardcoded. Lately they’ve been changing a lot of things to be data-driven, and able to be changed by datapacks
I said basically the same thing and got downvoted for it.
Hopefully the catch is nothing, but you can never be too sure.
They started providing deobfuscation maps 6 years ago
TIL
Oh I see it’s that time of the year where Mojang gives the community a bone after stomping on them the rest of the year.
Anyways as someone who has worked on Java projects extensively since 2020, very little will actually change from this. The main problem of Mojang’s asinine version numbering will continue to be a problem for any modding, server, building and resource pack projects past 1.19.
Mojang’s asinine version numbering
They do what now?
Mojang started adding in substantive resource pack changes in the patches for 1.19. Which made it more annoying for resource pack artists to support the update their since it required 2 separate versions of a pack to be made and maintained just to make sure it works properly. Let alone the annoyance of having to constantly deal with people complaining about it not working when it is an issue Mojang made.
There is also Mojang’s censorship of their community that began in the 1.19 patch versions which allowed Mojang to just ban anyone for saying something they didn’t like. Servers largely just disable it since it’s a headache to deal with and it doesn’t benefit them at all, only Mojang.
Then in 1.20 and 1.21 Mojang began adding content in the patches so it makes it a nightmare to support the patch versions since they now function differently than they used to. Which only makes it harder for servers to update and makes the experience of joining servers more frustrating. So plenty of servers on those updates just blacklist certain versions just to make sure things are able to function.
Oh and at some point Mojang added censorship to player skins. And it can be triggered by just mass reporting any individual skin for any reason.
Basically Mojang made a fuck ton of problems where none needed to be or used to be.
Also I just want to add this, but I was sounding the alarm on the patch version problem back in the 1.19 days. The community at the entire either ignored me or called me crazy for pointing out how it was problematic. Now the community is growing more and more annoyed and I’m just sitting over here saying I told you so.
I’ve mostly stopped playing the game because of Mojang’s constant shitty choices and because of the community refusing to call Mojang out on their bullshit.
The no chat reports mod and having community hosted servers that don’t really need to give a damn about what Mojang thinks (I’ll convert my server to support cracked accounts if I have to) kind of pulls the heavy lifting to allowing players to keep playing without having to give a shit about overall moderation by the company.
The no chat reports mod is great but it still is an uphill battle to get players to install it. We also need to focus on putting on Mojang to remove the problematic system in the first place so the experience is better for everyone including Bedrock players.
Installing the mod (or plugin) server-side strips all player chat messages of the information that makes them reportable, so no requirement is needed for the client (Although recommended for complete protection and for usage on non-compatible servers)
I am aware, all the servers I work on have it installed.
Previously, they had the versioning system 1.MAJOR.MINOR, where Major referred to a feature update, and minor referred to bug fixes or other non-breaking technical changes
The first instance where they broke this was 1.16.2 by adding the Piglin Brute, but this was so minor that hardly anyone really cared, and hey, free feature with a minor update!
Well, now they have update “drops” where the minor version means either what it used to, or it’s also a feature update, just not as big as a full update.
From the wiki:
- 1.20: Trails and Tales Update
- 1.20.3: Bats and Pots Drop
- 1.20.5: Armored Paws Drop
- 1.21: Tricky Trials Update
- 1.21.2: Bundles of Bravery Drop
- 1.21.4: The Garden Awakens Drop
- 1.21.5: Spring to Life Drop
- 1.21.6: Chase the Skies Drop
- 1.21.9: Copper Age Drop
That’s close to how the numbering system works! It’s MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, Mojang just doesn’t use the major part at all.
Also I completely forgot the piglin brute existed! Also netherite templates got added it the 1.16 patch versions too if I am remembering right.
the problem is that the way version numbers are handled now, it’s more like 1.MAJOR.MINOR, with no real definition of what counts as a “minor” update, so it’s hard to tell which versions are compatible. i feel like this problem would mostly go away if they either added another number to the version to signify patches, or actually used semver properly (they could mix these approaches to do something similar to java, so the next version would be 22.0.0)
i feel like this whole version debacle is only gonna get worse because microsoft is planning to move to a “content drop” model, with smaller more frequent updates, which means even more pressure on the “patch” version. so unless their update model or versioning systen changes, we’ll probably be playing 1.21.37 in a couple of years, and good luck figuring out which of those versions are actually compatible
It’s kind of like Java itself, Sun dropped the leading 1 after 1.4, following it up with Java 5.
Fuckin right?
ALSO can Mojang get my goshfuckin ALPHA account back that Microsoft deleted because I wasn’t paying attention to their bullshit during COVID and now it’s gone forever even if I make a Microsoft account which I will never do and now I have to pay money to Microsoft (which I will also never do and have never done)?
I’m pretty sure it was promised to me that I’d have Minecraft access forever because I bought an alpha account, but I guess now I have to give point to a horrible soulless corp to buy it again.
Go join mc: consequences edition https://discord.gg/mojanglawsuit (Website link in case you don’t wanna use discord: https://lawsuit.gg/)
Every Minecraft update just makes me hum “Where’s the modding API” again.
It’s datapacks
Absolute cowards. Won’t even release the comments.
“No” - Bartosz Boq 2025
This paired with the bedrock gdk release and changes to the file path so that we don’t need to use iobit unlocker to mod rtx files is some hella good vibes
Can’t say I saw that coming, particularly after Microsoft bought them. Nice to have a surprise be pleasant once in a while.
The most profitable decision for MS is to leave the golden goose alone.
I’m not super familiar with Java, but does this mean Java edition is basically source available, or is it still compiled Java bytecode but with proper variable names?
The latter
You can use tools like FernFlower to help turn that bytecode into actual Java.
Indeed - most Java IDEs have FernFlower built in, so it’s dead easy.
Decompiled Java is surprisingly close to the original, especially compared to eg. decompiled C++; good luck with that. You get all the class, function and variable names back on the original line numbers.
What you do not get back is any comments. So you can see what and how, but not why. Admittedly, most comments are kind of useless and do not explain ‘why’ very well, but for weird-but-critical code they can be essential.
Obfuscation got more and more useless, as there was a serious pressure that AFAIK even tools popped up to specifically de-obfuscate Minecraft.
Not only tools, Mojang themselves eventually provided obfuscation maps.
They’ve had something for quite a while now that made it so names weren’t changed between releases so stuff would work better. I don’t remember what it’s called. Like it used to be that a new version meant figuring out everything again.
Finally we can view Mojang’s shitty server multi-threading implementation in all its glory.
spoiler
___I look forward to several critical CVE being discovered like log4j
That would be good though. Better the communities finds them and they can be patched than when only some black hats know them.
Unironically, me too. They’re there now, waiting to be discovered. We can find them now on our terms or be surprised by them later.
Wasn’t log4j originally found by 2b2t players, then used maliciously and reported later on, then going onto get fixed by every major server framework like bukkit, paper, fabric, and more?
Nah, it was found sometime before november 24 2021, publicly disclosed in december 9 2021, and only used by 2b2t players on december 10 2021.
