Betacraft v2 progress update

by Moresteck

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

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).

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.