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📌 pinned post

Betacraft v2 progress update

by Moresteck

Created: 2025-02-12 17:23:11 UTC
Modified: 2025-06-27 08:28:16 UTC

We’ve cooked up a Java installations menu! Feast your eyes on this pretty screenshot:

Java installations settings menu

Unless you set otherwise in instance settings, the launcher will use the default Java version for a given Minecraft version (e.g. launching b1.7.3 will run with default Java 8, 1.20.4 with default Java 17, and 1.21.4 with default Java 21).

Setting as default only for LTS Java releases

Minecraft versions before 21w19a expect Java 5-8 depending on MC version (but we omit those below 8 in the main Betacraft v2 development — read below to know why), 21w19a - 1.18-pre1 expect Java 16 (but we ‘round it up’ to 17 because 16 is not LTS and our support for modern versions is minimal), 1.18-pre2 - 24w13a expect Java 17, and 24w13a onwards expect Java 21.

The reason we omit Java 5-7 for the ‘set as default’ option is because there’s rarely any case where someone on a modern platform would need to run Minecraft with such an old Java version.

However, this is going to be different for Betacraft Retro, a branch of the v2 launcher meant to support old platforms (such as Windows 95-8.1, OS X 10.4-10.13). There, ‘set as default’ will be enabled for Java 5, 6, and 7 too, since it would be quite annoying for a Windows 95 or an OS X 10.4 user to manually set Java 5 for each instance they make.

Since this is a dev log, I’m also tempted to explain the technical side of things. Internally in the code, a default Java 5-7 installation would be classified as ‘default 8’ for the sake of code simplicity. So, essentially in Betacraft Retro you’ll be able to set a default Java installation for Java version range 5-8. Neat, I think.

I think having defaults for each ‘milestone’ Java version, combined with Java auto-download feature will greatly improve user experience. No more hassling around with Java unless you really have to. That’s part of what we want to achieve in Betacraft v2.


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