Minecraft is not more demanding than some years ago, they didn't neceserily raise it, they just updated the info page. This snapshot from 2022 says minimum 4gb and recommend 8gb: https://archive.ph/NTMU4. Source was posted some days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49038901
If the new requirements are a dealbreaker for anyone, Mineclonia is a lightweight open-source alternative that runs on much weaker hardware and feels close to Minecraft.
My 13-year old son has an absolute blast writing mods for mineclonia with Gemini. He's later e on Diablo-style randomization of weapon drops, rune combinations that cast spells and have effects. And he's even working on what he calls an MMO, but really a server with quests and groups and classes, but probably wouldn't support more than about 16 players.
Mineclonia is the 'game' that loads into Luanti (formerly Minetest). Luanti has a c++ core engine, but definition of the worlds, rules, games, interactions is all lua
Yes, the engine handles shaders, networking, DBMS backends (Sqlite, Postgres,... to store "worlds"), entities (mobs/items/vehicles...) to name the obvious things, but the logic of the game (weather, mob AI, user/world interaction, inventories, forms and other dialog box, custom world generation) and other other functions (area protections in multiplayer, account management, chat moderation, ...) are done with Lua 5.1 JIT generally.
The API also gives access to things like image saturation, light intensity, strength of volumetric lighting/bloom/exposure, fog distance, so you can enhance weather effects by altering them - per player; OTOH, rain/snow has to be done with particle spawners by weather mods, and figuring out if the player is inside a building, under cover, or outside in the open is difficult.
One can also hook it with external services, e.g. instant messaging.
I didn't mean to make it seem small. I interpreted the comment as being surprised that it is written in a scripting language but Lua is no slouch, especially when the most performance sensitive code is C++. It's a very common pattern in games to boost iteration times - even the Unity engine does something similar.
OptiFine's developer is sort of known for not wanting to open up his project and accept outside help. A lot of people are turned off by that but personally I think it is whatever.
The biggest thing is that it is a mess of horribly unoptimized code, hobbled together over more than a decade. In some newer versions, OptiFine can actually perform worse than vanilla. Their rendering changes also cause many issues with other mods, and since it is closed source, developers can't fix them.
He is probably referring to Beta 1.6.x. I remember running 1.7.3 in 2011-2012 on a potentially 1 or 2GB RAM machine and some Nvidia 7xxx series card (7600?). It worked fine on Linux.
No reason it couldn't be Not-Beta 1.6.x besides the 1.3 singleplayer server split, which doubled memory requirements, but 1GB was enough after the split.
Nope, it was actual 1.6.4 (and probably beyond that too). It wasn't amazing but consistent 30fps with some ATI card from the time. It had a Pentium D of some sort, can't remember exactly what.
Made it through the account migration. But later lost my account after some hacker compromised my microsoft account. Microsoft kindly let me know about some unauthorized access, and then promptly deleted the account :) .
That was the last straw from Microsoft for me. Never again.
Was it really Microsoft or was it Mojang? There were two account transitions, and in my experience, most customers use Microsofts name, but are complaining about the first (Mojang, not Microsoft) transition.
I ran into problems because some time before the transition happened some bot use my email address to sign up for an XBox account, in German for some reason. So I have to first do an account takeover on some bot account that has been used for no doubt unsavory purposes meaning my Minecraft account is now tied to something that's likely to be randomly locked. Also, some communication has to be done in German because there is no way to change the original language set on the account, although most pages can be converted to English if I look through the various settings pages. Email is always in German though.
Also, can I say what a mess the whole Microsoft account thing is? There's at least three different systems kinda duct taped together and settings are scattered seemingly at random among those systems. Want to connect your Java Minecraft instance to a server you are running? Be ready to dive through pages of kid protection and security settings looking for the option that lets you do that again. Also, logging in used to be "enter your username and password when the game starts", but now involves a bunch of bouncing around half a dozen or so Microsoft pages getting redirects that fail 60% of the time for no stated reason. It's kinda killed any enthusiasm I have for checking out new releases, just knowing that I'm going to waste 10 minutes just trying to get the damn login working again.
Mine wasn't. I lost my main account as I couldn't verify I owned it given it was bought on a whim years ago through a giftcard, and they didn't have many recovery methods for those users. Then they permanently deleted the account after the transfer window was over. Luckily I had a second account I could transfer, but even if I could transfer the other account, you cannot have multiple Minecraft accounts tied to a single Microsoft account and having multiple Microsoft accounts is against TOS.
You couldn't verify you owned it because you didn't have access to the email presumably? What account system doesn't work like that?
Also - having multiple Microsoft accounts is absolutely permitted, I have multiple due to their Xbox profile messiness (it is possibly to detach Xbox profiles and they can't be reattached if you ever navigate to the Xbox website while it's detached...) and senior support endorsed it as the recommended solution.
As one of the Devs responsible for the technical part of that transition: thank you. We tried real hard to give users the best possible experience, but I think it has nevertheless been the least appreciated piece of code I have ever written. So it's nice to finally hear some positive accounts from users!
I truly think you folks did the account transition in the most user-friendly, considerate way you possibly could. There was SO MUCH TIME to migrate and SO MANY WARNINGS about it needing to be done. I'm sorry you haven't been appreciated for it. Well done!
Really? I still have my 9.95 PayPal email receipt from buying the game in 2010, but I don’t have a single email sent to that email address about any sort of migration.
I mean, the code is unappreciated because the fundamental premise was broken. Locking users out of their paid accounts if they don't respond within some X deadline (no matter how long X is), without a refund, is a completely unacceptable "solution" to technical debt. The fact that you tried your best to give users a good experience doesn't matter if it's serving a fundamentally broken goal.
barely made it myself. Turns out the MS username namespace didn't allow all minecraft names. I repeatedly failed migration because it was trying to auto-port an illegal username. the error was of course entirely opaque.
I just downloaded a game I bought on steam 12 years ago and played it. I hadn't really thought of the game in the intervening time. If this had been minecraft, I'd have had to pay for the game again because I didn't convert my account.
But no, subnautica was ready to go, though the base building was just as buggy as it was before.
I really don't care about Microsoft's maintenance costs. I should be able to play the game I paid for 20 years from now without having to jump through hoops in the intervening period. It's not my fault that they decided to make my perfectly normal account a "legacy" account, that was their decision.
It would have been better if they hadn't required you to migrate at all. And a lot of people, including me, ran into issues during the migration process. Thankfully I was able to get it sorted out after contacting support, but other people weren't so lucky.
Just want to chime in as an anecdote who could not migrate. I attempted to migrate within the deadlines, yet the system refused to work. Contacted support and they were no help, in spite of my receipt and presumably, Notch’s log of my purchase.
But hey, trillion dollar company tried hard. Nothing more could have been done.
Well it did used to run on early Raspis. Maybe you don't realise how much less efficient it's gotten? It used to run fine in 256MB with small render distance.
So how did they break that?
* run both server and client when in singleplayer - doubles memory use
* turn byte block IDs into object pointers - octuples memory use for blocks
* make all game content into JSON object trees with huge amounts of indirection - adds about a GB of objects deserialized at startup that used to be simple if/then ladders
* add a whole bunch of code to handle these object trees, don't know how much this adds but probably 100MB of code when you include the raw class files through to the JIT-optimized assembly.
Are you referring to Minecraft Pi Edition that came with Raspberry Pi OS back in the day? The one made in C++ instead of the original Java edition?
> run both server and client when in singleplayer - doubles memory use
When did this change? It's been like that for as long as I can remember. It's actually a very common thing for games to do because it requires less code. Also it doesn't actually double memory use - game content can be shared, textures/meshes/audio is only on the client, etc. The chunk and entity data would need to be duplicated but they should be smaller.
> Chunk data was traditionally the biggest part of Minecraft's memory use until they added a bunch more garbage.
But that's only really because it is extremely light on assets that are typically large in other games.
I'm a bit indifferent about this. Obviously they made a lot of decisions that aren't good for performance but it's a tradeoff. Notch was most productive working in Java so he could pump out updates quicker, and it helped with modding even though builds were obfuscated. NBT helped maintain backwards compatibility of worlds and probably helped with modding too. If they had done things differently then Minecraft may not have been the huge success that it is.
Is this 16GB for those so-called "Vibrant Visuals" or just for parity with the old version? If the latter, then what's the point of the transition to Vulkan if it quadruples resource use?
> For minimum requirements, the new target is 1080p at 30 FPS using the Fast preset. This means a 64-bit system, 8 GB of RAM with a discrete GPU or 12 GB with integrated graphics, a 4-core processor, and a Vulkan 1.3 capable GPU with at least 2 GB of VRAM.
> For recommended requirements, the new target is 1080p at 60 FPS using the Fancy preset. This includes 16 GB of RAM, a stronger modern processor, and a more capable graphics card with 6 GB of VRAM.
This blog post also implies that the requirements bump is due to numerous changes to Minecraft over the years, not just the change to Vulkan.
> If you already play Java Edition without issues, you may not notice anything changing right away. If your game often struggles, the new requirements may help explain why and give you a clearer target for a smoother experience.
> [...] and give you a clearer target for a smoother experience.
Actually, this means you're better running and older version. Is not that Minecraft makes huge improvements with each release. IMHO not enough to justify 16GB of RAM and a GPU with at least 6GB of VRAM.
Especially these days with memory being so expensive.
Minecraft is not more demanding than some years ago, they didn't neceserily raise it, they just updated the info page. This snapshot from 2022 says minimum 4gb and recommend 8gb: https://archive.ph/NTMU4. Source was posted some days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49038901
It's a pretty weird recommended amount of RAM too. 8GB is enough to run heavily modded Minecraft. Vanilla Minecraft can easily run on 4GB or less.
It will only cost you $200 in RAM, definitely a good time to raise the minimum/recommended specifications.
It's only a change on paper, in reality it was unrealistically low for a long time
Is that ever since 1.8 made the whole game engine vastly less efficient? The game used to run with 256MB.
> The game used to run with 256MB.
These are system requirements - not how much the game actually uses.
There's modpacks, e.g. fabulously optimized. It makes mc playable but 256MiB basically gets you to the Java runtime nowadays.
Less efficient but faster, which is a fun combination. At least they seem to have improved FPS.
That's probably because you got a new graphics card some time in the last 10 years.
If the new requirements are a dealbreaker for anyone, Mineclonia is a lightweight open-source alternative that runs on much weaker hardware and feels close to Minecraft.
My 13-year old son has an absolute blast writing mods for mineclonia with Gemini. He's later e on Diablo-style randomization of weapon drops, rune combinations that cast spells and have effects. And he's even working on what he calls an MMO, but really a server with quests and groups and classes, but probably wouldn't support more than about 16 players.
Great platform for hacking.
Mineclonia is the 'game' that loads into Luanti (formerly Minetest). Luanti has a c++ core engine, but definition of the worlds, rules, games, interactions is all lua
Often kids are playing the game and kids want to play what their friends play and that's most likely not mineclonia.
So first I'd test mods [1] that improve performance. The best thing about java Minecraft is the modding scene.
[1] https://modrinth.com/collection/Dtkcqkms/mods
I'm fascinated with how that game is almost entirely written in Lua.
The underlying voxel game engine is written in C++.
https://github.com/luanti-org/luanti
Yes, the engine handles shaders, networking, DBMS backends (Sqlite, Postgres,... to store "worlds"), entities (mobs/items/vehicles...) to name the obvious things, but the logic of the game (weather, mob AI, user/world interaction, inventories, forms and other dialog box, custom world generation) and other other functions (area protections in multiplayer, account management, chat moderation, ...) are done with Lua 5.1 JIT generally.
The API also gives access to things like image saturation, light intensity, strength of volumetric lighting/bloom/exposure, fog distance, so you can enhance weather effects by altering them - per player; OTOH, rain/snow has to be done with particle spawners by weather mods, and figuring out if the player is inside a building, under cover, or outside in the open is difficult.
One can also hook it with external services, e.g. instant messaging.
[1] https://content.luanti.org/packages/?type=mod&page=1&tag=com... (couldn't find a more accurate category in ContentDB; it's "complex" because downloading and installing a mod or a game with Luanti is a couple of clicks).
I didn't mean to make it seem small. I interpreted the comment as being surprised that it is written in a scripting language but Lua is no slouch, especially when the most performance sensitive code is C++. It's a very common pattern in games to boost iteration times - even the Unity engine does something similar.
No worries, I simply took the chance to give a more detailed picture.
For reference, this is what Minecraft used to need, back around 2013[0]:
Minimum Requirements:
CPU : Intel P4/NetBurst Architecture or its AMD Equivalent (AMD K7)
RAM : 2GB
GPU : Intel GMA 950 or AMD Equivalent
HDD : At least 90MB for Game Core and Sound Files
Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 or up is required to be able to run the game.
Recommended Requirements:
CPU : Intel Pentium D or AMD Athlon 64 (K8) 2.6 GHz
RAM : 4GB
GPU : GeForce 6xxx or ATI Radeon 9xxx and up with OpenGL 2 Support (Excluding Integrated Chipsets)
HDD : 150MB
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20130124012851/http://help.mojan...
I highly recommend using the open source Sodium and Lithium mods to improve performance. And I hope you're not still using OptiFine!
https://github.com/CaffeineMC/sodium
https://github.com/CaffeineMC/lithium
I don't use OptiFine but care to explain to someone not in the loop why they should avoid OptiFine?
OptiFine's developer is sort of known for not wanting to open up his project and accept outside help. A lot of people are turned off by that but personally I think it is whatever.
The biggest thing is that it is a mess of horribly unoptimized code, hobbled together over more than a decade. In some newer versions, OptiFine can actually perform worse than vanilla. Their rendering changes also cause many issues with other mods, and since it is closed source, developers can't fix them.
Fabric or NeoForge running a handful of mods is vastly superior. It has been a bit but I would recommend looking at Fabulously Optimized as plug-and-play alternative | https://github.com/Fabulously-Optimized/fabulously-optimized
I remember playing back in like the 1.6.4 era on a piece of garbage from 2005 with a monstrous 1GB of ram.
1.6.4 released in 2013.
I'm pretty sure I had 8 GB back then, possibly 16 GB.
I can't imagine how poorly that ran.
He is probably referring to Beta 1.6.x. I remember running 1.7.3 in 2011-2012 on a potentially 1 or 2GB RAM machine and some Nvidia 7xxx series card (7600?). It worked fine on Linux.
No reason it couldn't be Not-Beta 1.6.x besides the 1.3 singleplayer server split, which doubled memory requirements, but 1GB was enough after the split.
Nope, it was actual 1.6.4 (and probably beyond that too). It wasn't amazing but consistent 30fps with some ATI card from the time. It had a Pentium D of some sort, can't remember exactly what.
This might have impacted me, had Microsoft not deleted my legacy account. So I suppose I'll just stick to Tekkit Classic on my pirated client.
Made it through the account migration. But later lost my account after some hacker compromised my microsoft account. Microsoft kindly let me know about some unauthorized access, and then promptly deleted the account :) .
That was the last straw from Microsoft for me. Never again.
Was it really Microsoft or was it Mojang? There were two account transitions, and in my experience, most customers use Microsofts name, but are complaining about the first (Mojang, not Microsoft) transition.
It doesn't matter. An acquiring company acquires the 'sins of the father' as well. A paying customer had their account wiped out is the bottom line.
You're telling me people lost access to their Minecraft accounts due to a transition BEFORE Microsoft owned it? I had no idea.
I have lots of problems with Microsoft but the Minecraft transition was handled very responsibly.
I ran into problems because some time before the transition happened some bot use my email address to sign up for an XBox account, in German for some reason. So I have to first do an account takeover on some bot account that has been used for no doubt unsavory purposes meaning my Minecraft account is now tied to something that's likely to be randomly locked. Also, some communication has to be done in German because there is no way to change the original language set on the account, although most pages can be converted to English if I look through the various settings pages. Email is always in German though.
Also, can I say what a mess the whole Microsoft account thing is? There's at least three different systems kinda duct taped together and settings are scattered seemingly at random among those systems. Want to connect your Java Minecraft instance to a server you are running? Be ready to dive through pages of kid protection and security settings looking for the option that lets you do that again. Also, logging in used to be "enter your username and password when the game starts", but now involves a bunch of bouncing around half a dozen or so Microsoft pages getting redirects that fail 60% of the time for no stated reason. It's kinda killed any enthusiasm I have for checking out new releases, just knowing that I'm going to waste 10 minutes just trying to get the damn login working again.
> can I say what a mess the whole Microsoft account thing
absolutely agree
Fun fact, Xbox profiles can be disconnected from Microsoft accounts without doing 2FA verification. It's a whole problem right now.
Using a third-party launcher (e.g. Prism) mostly fixes that nonsense, at least.
Mine wasn't. I lost my main account as I couldn't verify I owned it given it was bought on a whim years ago through a giftcard, and they didn't have many recovery methods for those users. Then they permanently deleted the account after the transfer window was over. Luckily I had a second account I could transfer, but even if I could transfer the other account, you cannot have multiple Minecraft accounts tied to a single Microsoft account and having multiple Microsoft accounts is against TOS.
You couldn't verify you owned it because you didn't have access to the email presumably? What account system doesn't work like that?
Also - having multiple Microsoft accounts is absolutely permitted, I have multiple due to their Xbox profile messiness (it is possibly to detach Xbox profiles and they can't be reattached if you ever navigate to the Xbox website while it's detached...) and senior support endorsed it as the recommended solution.
The biggest issue I have with it was the lack of support for multiple accounts a la World of Warcraft style: why do I need 3 Microslop accounts?
I would agree.
They honored my account, and I originally bought the game when you had to send Notch money directly for him to send you a copy.
Microsoft was great in this instance.
As one of the Devs responsible for the technical part of that transition: thank you. We tried real hard to give users the best possible experience, but I think it has nevertheless been the least appreciated piece of code I have ever written. So it's nice to finally hear some positive accounts from users!
So, again, just thanks for saying this.
I paid for Minecraft and can no longer play it. I'm supposed to be thankful for this?
If you choose to work for EvilCorp don't be surprised when you get assigned to work on tickets that make people unhappy.
When you "buy" anything digital, you're not ever owning it.
It's unfortunate, and Microsoft is no saint, but Mojang's depreciation was inevitable.
Notch's terms of sale were that you get access to every version of Minecraft forever.
Notch has said a lot of things that are rather evidently untrue in reality.
The solution is consumer rights laws, not victim blaming.
Minecraft has an authoritative nameserver. Even regulation wouldn't decouple it from the owner.
I can't even download and play the game that I purchased in single player mode. The name server doesn't matter for that.
I truly think you folks did the account transition in the most user-friendly, considerate way you possibly could. There was SO MUCH TIME to migrate and SO MANY WARNINGS about it needing to be done. I'm sorry you haven't been appreciated for it. Well done!
As if giving users more time to accept bad terms before the rug pull is commendable.
"It needing to be done"?
I didn't accept any terms with MS and I haven't received any refund or whatever other compensation.
Really? I still have my 9.95 PayPal email receipt from buying the game in 2010, but I don’t have a single email sent to that email address about any sort of migration.
I mean, the code is unappreciated because the fundamental premise was broken. Locking users out of their paid accounts if they don't respond within some X deadline (no matter how long X is), without a refund, is a completely unacceptable "solution" to technical debt. The fact that you tried your best to give users a good experience doesn't matter if it's serving a fundamentally broken goal.
Related: https://emersion.fr/blog/2020/saying-no-to-unethical-tasks/
>the best possible experience
It's comforting to know that a game I bought and paid for, that was taken from me, is "the best possible experience".
It soured me so much on Minecraft that I can't even be bothered to pirate it.
barely made it myself. Turns out the MS username namespace didn't allow all minecraft names. I repeatedly failed migration because it was trying to auto-port an illegal username. the error was of course entirely opaque.
I don't love that I need a Microsoft account to log into minecraft, but the alternative was losing it permanently.
don’t know why you’re getting downvoted, they gave legacy users literal years to migrate
I just downloaded a game I bought on steam 12 years ago and played it. I hadn't really thought of the game in the intervening time. If this had been minecraft, I'd have had to pay for the game again because I didn't convert my account.
But no, subnautica was ready to go, though the base building was just as buggy as it was before.
I really don't care about Microsoft's maintenance costs. I should be able to play the game I paid for 20 years from now without having to jump through hoops in the intervening period. It's not my fault that they decided to make my perfectly normal account a "legacy" account, that was their decision.
It would have been better if they hadn't required you to migrate at all. And a lot of people, including me, ran into issues during the migration process. Thankfully I was able to get it sorted out after contacting support, but other people weren't so lucky.
Just want to chime in as an anecdote who could not migrate. I attempted to migrate within the deadlines, yet the system refused to work. Contacted support and they were no help, in spite of my receipt and presumably, Notch’s log of my purchase.
But hey, trillion dollar company tried hard. Nothing more could have been done.
They should have made it a seamless transition for legacy users.
They could have just emailed new codes to every legacy email on file and that would at least given the possibility of keeping most customers whole.
Is this the evolution of something that used to run moderately well on a mid-range Raspberry pi?
Don Priestley (Mazogs), stares down with a withering look.
Wasn't that the Bedrock edition? Or "Minecraft Education Edition"? An alternative C++ version, anyway.
I can't imagine Java Minecraft ever to have run well on a mid-range Raspi.
Well it did used to run on early Raspis. Maybe you don't realise how much less efficient it's gotten? It used to run fine in 256MB with small render distance.
So how did they break that?
* run both server and client when in singleplayer - doubles memory use
* turn byte block IDs into object pointers - octuples memory use for blocks
* make all game content into JSON object trees with huge amounts of indirection - adds about a GB of objects deserialized at startup that used to be simple if/then ladders
* add a whole bunch of code to handle these object trees, don't know how much this adds but probably 100MB of code when you include the raw class files through to the JIT-optimized assembly.
Are you referring to Minecraft Pi Edition that came with Raspberry Pi OS back in the day? The one made in C++ instead of the original Java edition?
> run both server and client when in singleplayer - doubles memory use
When did this change? It's been like that for as long as I can remember. It's actually a very common thing for games to do because it requires less code. Also it doesn't actually double memory use - game content can be shared, textures/meshes/audio is only on the client, etc. The chunk and entity data would need to be duplicated but they should be smaller.
1.3, not beta 1.3. Chunk data was traditionally the biggest part of Minecraft's memory use until they added a bunch more garbage.
Interesting they switched after a couple years!
> Chunk data was traditionally the biggest part of Minecraft's memory use until they added a bunch more garbage.
But that's only really because it is extremely light on assets that are typically large in other games.
I'm a bit indifferent about this. Obviously they made a lot of decisions that aren't good for performance but it's a tradeoff. Notch was most productive working in Java so he could pump out updates quicker, and it helped with modding even though builds were obfuscated. NBT helped maintain backwards compatibility of worlds and probably helped with modding too. If they had done things differently then Minecraft may not have been the huge success that it is.
[dead]
Is this 16GB for those so-called "Vibrant Visuals" or just for parity with the old version? If the latter, then what's the point of the transition to Vulkan if it quadruples resource use?
https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-java-editi...
> For minimum requirements, the new target is 1080p at 30 FPS using the Fast preset. This means a 64-bit system, 8 GB of RAM with a discrete GPU or 12 GB with integrated graphics, a 4-core processor, and a Vulkan 1.3 capable GPU with at least 2 GB of VRAM.
> For recommended requirements, the new target is 1080p at 60 FPS using the Fancy preset. This includes 16 GB of RAM, a stronger modern processor, and a more capable graphics card with 6 GB of VRAM.
This blog post also implies that the requirements bump is due to numerous changes to Minecraft over the years, not just the change to Vulkan.
> If you already play Java Edition without issues, you may not notice anything changing right away. If your game often struggles, the new requirements may help explain why and give you a clearer target for a smoother experience.
> [...] and give you a clearer target for a smoother experience.
Actually, this means you're better running and older version. Is not that Minecraft makes huge improvements with each release. IMHO not enough to justify 16GB of RAM and a GPU with at least 6GB of VRAM.
Especially these days with memory being so expensive.
Are they cutting the default world update distance to leave more room for bling too? :)
recommended amount of wam