Friendly, and unsolicited reminder that the Minetest engine + its game Mineclonia (or alternatively Voxelibre) are a pretty good open source alternative as of late.
Minetest is also getting some pretty nice upgrades to its graphics lately. The upcoming release should be looking quite pretty.
Well for the sake of context Mineclonia is a fork of Mineclone2, which has now rebranded itself as VoxeLibre. The project was forked due to personal and design disputes. In fact the most productive developer of Mineclonia, used to be the lead dev of mcl2.
Currently VoxeLibre maintains the continuity of the original project and the community which explains its higher popularity. Mineclonia by comparison has very little presence, the discord server was set up like a couple of months ago I think.
But in terms of code, mineclonia has been the faster evolving of the two. More features, more bug fixes, and advances from voxelibre that are deemed valuable are cherry picked. In terms of specific features, I really prefer the double digging depth, and the better villages. And voxelibre has significantly shortened the attack range which I find really annoying.
Other than that, mineclonia is more commited to being a true clone of minecraft, with voxelibre going out of its way to diverge, especially after the rebrand, which might turn out to be wise if microsoft’s trademark lawyers come knocking.
Nope, you can just use these mods for the time being.
On the flip side, it’s orders of magnitude easier to write a Minetest mod, and keep it updated with later versions and compatible with other mods.
Highly unlikely. Minecraft has a lot of quirky code, and the mods would have been built around that code.
For all intents and purposes, the clones are a different game entirely, and unless the mod author specifically goes out of their way to make their mod compatible with the clones, or a different version for it, they won’t work.
Indeed you can. Personally I find the phone interface a bit too clunky, but if your phone’s hardware is up for it, it does run, and all platforms that support Minetest are compatible with each other.
It was one post on Reddit. It had a ton of comments but it isn’t a huge number of players mad about it. It was in a piracy sub and still most of the comments were along the lines of “Why didn’t you migrate your account during the 3ish years they were emailing people who hadn’t done it?” And the rest were either “DRM bad” or “Just pirate it, it’s not hard.”
Not really a news worthy thing. People had more than enough time and warning to move their account and the people who didn’t have nothing to stand on other than misplaced anger. I’m not a fan of Microsoft but they really did handle the migration well and gave people way more time and notice than they needed to.
Not to Pirate, (i own the Java version since 2015~)but is there a way to have a minecraft executable that runs localy and never connects to microsoft/internet?
I know minetest exists, have made a world there a while ago, but its ever so slightly diffrent
The official Minecraft server .jars (and all the modded ones) can be configured to not check in with Microsoft. The game itself can be launched in offline mode too. Might be easier to get it set up with a 3rd party launcher instead of the official one.
I have gotten more free accounts on Minecraft than any other game. I bought it twice on Java (not counting copies I bought for family) and once on bedrock, so when they moved accounts to Microsoft and gave every Java account a bedrock account and every bedrock account a Java account, so I now have three on each version. A second (or third) account is useful for rescuing your main account in some circumstances
I’m very surprised by the discourse in this thread. I understand that people were given lots of warning, but that doesn’t excuse that they just had their purchase recinded. Why not just allow download of an old version of Minecraft Java still?
I’d consider myself a Microsoft fanboy as I’ve had Xbox live for nearly 2 decades and Game Pass since it came into existence. Removing people’s purchases for any reason is a scummy move.
Devil’s advocate: the login requires a server, so even old versions won’t work unless they keep them online. And without support, they will be easy target for hackers.
I hate this, and honestly the best would have been to not change the logging at all. I bought a game that didn’t need a MS account to play and this change doesn’t bring any benefit.
If you self host an older version, you can allow non-authenticated users. I did that for years so my kids could play on our LAN with just the one license. I eventually bought a second license, but we still haven’t played outside our LAN.
I am against DRM just like everyone else but trust me they tried. They emailed me constantly telling me to move the account. There has to be some personal responsibility right?
They got sent a link before closing for good. That was their option to redeem. If they didn’t in all that time, it’s probably because they don’t want to keep their account.
Keeping legacy systems costs money, they have no reason to keep those codes valid for 30 years just in case someone decided they wanted to keep their account after 30 years.
They gave users more than enough time to migrate. 3 years is a lot of time. In most Democratic countries elections come up every 4 years, it’s almost a full election cycle.
They got sent a link before closing for good. That was their option to redeem. If they didn’t in all that time, it’s probably because they don’t want to keep their account.
Or… and maybe we think about this for a second. I wanted to buy a game. Not an account to Microsoft. Migrating to another service wasn’t in the terms I agreed to… especially to Microsoft.
Who said 30 years. It’s just a code sent to email with expiration. And when digital codes are sold what is this supposed legacy system. Did Microsoft suddenly stop selling digital codes?
I thought you meant they send a code that never expires so you can recover your old account. What you are proposing is give everyone who didn’t migrate a code to redeem Minecraft?
That is even less viable. That’s basically giving everyone that didn’t migrate a full refund (+ extra because now Minecraft is cheaper so you can sell it for more). Which would also lead to a potential customer lost because they bought the “second hand” key.
Why would Microsoft do that. They’d be better off just paypaling every non-migrated account 20€.
I think that’s not a good idea for the same reason that password reset emails expire within minutes.
On another platform, they might have transferred the accounts anyway and force password resets, but that’s likely not an option since they’re MS accounts.
They could create a MS account for you based on your email, and have it locked such that you need to reset through their system. Seems reasonable to me.
I guess it’s too much to ask the richest company on the planet to keep a list of a few accounts indefinitely. I’m sure that database is a whole gigabyte sized and maintaining it requires a whole person to check in on it once in a while. Obviously they can only afford that level of effort for a year or two. And we’re only taking about removing access from millions of people to something they paid good money for, and also doing it because. Yeah, I’m with you on this one, totally not their fault.
i wonder if this and other obscure errors people get that prevent them from transitioning is done on purpose for randomly chosen users, its more money for them after all when people have to buy the game again.
My account wasn’t even valid anymore, I bought one of those cards with a code on it to get minecraft when I first started playing and then there was about a 8 to 9 year gap where I didn’t even think about it
These people had years to migrate their accounts, were told to migrate their accounts, and warned to migrate their accounts because the old mojang auth system is insecure and needs to be sunsetted, and when it does, they will lose access.
They sat there and played the “no, I won’t move” game, and now they’re upset because the thing they were told for years would happen happened.
And they would have had to have no social interaction with any minecraft player on any online platform and in real life in all those years, as well as ignore every email from mojang, never look at the minecraft website, and so on, to not be notified.
I basically agree with all of that, but it was totally possible to upgrade the auth system and keep it separate from Microsoft. Obviously Microsoft wouldn’t do that, but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?
I don’t think any company would want to keep a separate auth system if they can help it, though. No one wants to spend resources maintaining redundant account systems and interfaces between them when they have the option to consolidate.
But I suppose I just don’t see why there had to be a deadline at all. They know the email addresses associated to the original accounts, so there should just be a database they can reference to check if that email address has an unmigrated account and prompt to convert when next they log in. This is beyond “I don’t want to maintain two account systems,” it’s “Let’s just throw away this old table of email addresses so we can make more room on our servers for telemetry data.”
I bought Minecraft when it was first purchaseable. Only converted my account last month as my new-school-entrant kid has asked what it is.
And honestly, I wish I didn’t. The MS launcher is an absolute shit show in usability for adults, let alone kids. Next time it forces me to log back in I’m just pirating it.
I bought two copies, I’ll fucking run them how I please.
I use the Modrinth App because it’s the place where cool people get minecraft mods now, and as a Minecraft launcher it’s a lot better - it uses an auth token system so you only sign in once with Microsoft’s website to connect the app to the login.
I bought the game at the of alpha with an email I lost access to at some point. I remember my Password and Username but forgot the email address I used. I think it also wasn’t even possible to change the email address in the Mojang Account back then. So I definitely didn’t sit around and ignored the migration, I even tried contacting the support.
Anyways what sucks is that I remembered my email address this winter, but already after the cut off point. Would have been nice to get to keep that very old account. But as others have mentioned, the experience is probably better with a pirated version anyway.
Welp, guess my account is gone. That’s kind of shitty but I bought it just out of alpha and realistically wasn’t going to play it again. And now if I ever want to I’ll just pirate it.
I only saw the warning the first time it was announced, which I transfered over back then. But then I never heard of it again, so if someone happened to have been busy and missed it the first time it made headlines I could see how they could be caught off guard with how I completely forgot about it until it made headlines for it being discontinued.
For people that didn’t transfer right away, like me, I got so many emails telling me to transfer the account. So people that didn’t transfer right away, stil got plenty of notice
That doesn’t matter. You don’t get to just unlitaterally revoke something people paid for because they didn’t want to sign up for an account at a company that was unrelated to Minecraft when they bought the game. This should be illegal.
That doesn’t matter. If you buy a house and miss a sentence buried in page 2,784 of the agreement that says that the previous owner can arbitrarily decide to take the house back whenever they feel like it, that still won’t hold up in court. Digital products need to work the same way.
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Friendly, and unsolicited reminder that the Minetest engine + its game Mineclonia (or alternatively Voxelibre) are a pretty good open source alternative as of late.
Minetest is also getting some pretty nice upgrades to its graphics lately. The upcoming release should be looking quite pretty.
I see that Voxelibre has considerably more players, but you list Mineclonia first. Do you have a preference between the two?
Well for the sake of context Mineclonia is a fork of Mineclone2, which has now rebranded itself as VoxeLibre. The project was forked due to personal and design disputes. In fact the most productive developer of Mineclonia, used to be the lead dev of mcl2.
Currently VoxeLibre maintains the continuity of the original project and the community which explains its higher popularity. Mineclonia by comparison has very little presence, the discord server was set up like a couple of months ago I think.
But in terms of code, mineclonia has been the faster evolving of the two. More features, more bug fixes, and advances from voxelibre that are deemed valuable are cherry picked. In terms of specific features, I really prefer the double digging depth, and the better villages. And voxelibre has significantly shortened the attack range which I find really annoying.
Other than that, mineclonia is more commited to being a true clone of minecraft, with voxelibre going out of its way to diverge, especially after the rebrand, which might turn out to be wise if microsoft’s trademark lawyers come knocking.
Can you use minecraft mods with any of these clones?
If not it’s kind of a deal breaker.
Nope, you can just use these mods for the time being.
On the flip side, it’s orders of magnitude easier to write a Minetest mod, and keep it updated with later versions and compatible with other mods.
Highly unlikely. Minecraft has a lot of quirky code, and the mods would have been built around that code.
For all intents and purposes, the clones are a different game entirely, and unless the mod author specifically goes out of their way to make their mod compatible with the clones, or a different version for it, they won’t work.
I see Minetest is available for android. Can you run Mineclonia on a phone?
Indeed you can. Personally I find the phone interface a bit too clunky, but if your phone’s hardware is up for it, it does run, and all platforms that support Minetest are compatible with each other.
+1 for Minetest
I run a server on our local network that kiddos love
It was fairly simple to setup including which game type and mods
🏴☠️💃🦜
It was one post on Reddit. It had a ton of comments but it isn’t a huge number of players mad about it. It was in a piracy sub and still most of the comments were along the lines of “Why didn’t you migrate your account during the 3ish years they were emailing people who hadn’t done it?” And the rest were either “DRM bad” or “Just pirate it, it’s not hard.”
Not really a news worthy thing. People had more than enough time and warning to move their account and the people who didn’t have nothing to stand on other than misplaced anger. I’m not a fan of Microsoft but they really did handle the migration well and gave people way more time and notice than they needed to.
Happy pride month?
Not to Pirate, (i own the Java version since 2015~)but is there a way to have a minecraft executable that runs localy and never connects to microsoft/internet? I know minetest exists, have made a world there a while ago, but its ever so slightly diffrent
The official Minecraft server .jars (and all the modded ones) can be configured to not check in with Microsoft. The game itself can be launched in offline mode too. Might be easier to get it set up with a 3rd party launcher instead of the official one.
UltimMC lets you play without an account
I paid for Minecraft more times than any other game. If there’s a free way to play it, I do feel entitled to that.
I have gotten more free accounts on Minecraft than any other game. I bought it twice on Java (not counting copies I bought for family) and once on bedrock, so when they moved accounts to Microsoft and gave every Java account a bedrock account and every bedrock account a Java account, so I now have three on each version. A second (or third) account is useful for rescuing your main account in some circumstances
Man I made my Mojang account so long ago that when I tried to transition I couldn’t recover the account password to do it.
If your mad it’s your own fault you had 3 years
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If your mad it’s you’re own fault
I “transitioned” to Vintage Story anyway.
Thanks for the heads up on that game. Looks fun!
It’s basically TerraFirmaCraft, but as a standalone game, if you ever played that mod.
I’m very surprised by the discourse in this thread. I understand that people were given lots of warning, but that doesn’t excuse that they just had their purchase recinded. Why not just allow download of an old version of Minecraft Java still?
I’d consider myself a Microsoft fanboy as I’ve had Xbox live for nearly 2 decades and Game Pass since it came into existence. Removing people’s purchases for any reason is a scummy move.
Devil’s advocate: the login requires a server, so even old versions won’t work unless they keep them online. And without support, they will be easy target for hackers.
I hate this, and honestly the best would have been to not change the logging at all. I bought a game that didn’t need a MS account to play and this change doesn’t bring any benefit.
Also lots of other places (YouTube as an example) allow you to migrate your account indefinitely, over a decade after they were purchased.
If you self host an older version, you can allow non-authenticated users. I did that for years so my kids could play on our LAN with just the one license. I eventually bought a second license, but we still haven’t played outside our LAN.
Keeping up a server that allows migration has negligable costs for a product the size of minecraft. There is no excuse…
Keep that in mind next time you consider giving money to Microsoft. I definitely do.
I’m just playing devil’s advocate, and never es l was this name more appropriate.
I am against DRM just like everyone else but trust me they tried. They emailed me constantly telling me to move the account. There has to be some personal responsibility right?
Couldn’t they have closed the migration but sent out redemption codes to people’s emails for those who hadn’t migrated?
The migration has been going on for multiple years (I believe more than 5). Anyone who wanted to keep their account would’ve done so.
So why not send a code to them before closing it for good so they have an option to redeem versus none at all.
Because those people could then sell those codes and reap profit that belongs to poor, poor, Microsoft
They got sent a link before closing for good. That was their option to redeem. If they didn’t in all that time, it’s probably because they don’t want to keep their account.
Keeping legacy systems costs money, they have no reason to keep those codes valid for 30 years just in case someone decided they wanted to keep their account after 30 years.
They gave users more than enough time to migrate. 3 years is a lot of time. In most Democratic countries elections come up every 4 years, it’s almost a full election cycle.
That’s an assumption that leads to corporate bullshit like this.
Or… and maybe we think about this for a second. I wanted to buy a game. Not an account to Microsoft. Migrating to another service wasn’t in the terms I agreed to… especially to Microsoft.
Who said 30 years. It’s just a code sent to email with expiration. And when digital codes are sold what is this supposed legacy system. Did Microsoft suddenly stop selling digital codes?
I thought you meant they send a code that never expires so you can recover your old account. What you are proposing is give everyone who didn’t migrate a code to redeem Minecraft?
That is even less viable. That’s basically giving everyone that didn’t migrate a full refund (+ extra because now Minecraft is cheaper so you can sell it for more). Which would also lead to a potential customer lost because they bought the “second hand” key.
Why would Microsoft do that. They’d be better off just paypaling every non-migrated account 20€.
I think that’s not a good idea for the same reason that password reset emails expire within minutes.
On another platform, they might have transferred the accounts anyway and force password resets, but that’s likely not an option since they’re MS accounts.
But the alternative is just closing it and now there being no option at all.
They could create a MS account for you based on your email, and have it locked such that you need to reset through their system. Seems reasonable to me.
I guess it’s too much to ask the richest company on the planet to keep a list of a few accounts indefinitely. I’m sure that database is a whole gigabyte sized and maintaining it requires a whole person to check in on it once in a while. Obviously they can only afford that level of effort for a year or two. And we’re only taking about removing access from millions of people to something they paid good money for, and also doing it because. Yeah, I’m with you on this one, totally not their fault.
The richest company on the planet is Walmart.
I think that depends on your metric.
Market cap, revenue, profit, assets? They will all have a different leaderboard.
False. It’s Microsoft.
“Richest” isn’t really a term you can compare without further clarification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_revenue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization
Responsible for what? Getting something I paid for stolen?
I tried transitioning my account and every time it said it was done, I’d get another email saying I need to do it
i wonder if this and other obscure errors people get that prevent them from transitioning is done on purpose for randomly chosen users, its more money for them after all when people have to buy the game again.
My account wasn’t even valid anymore, I bought one of those cards with a code on it to get minecraft when I first started playing and then there was about a 8 to 9 year gap where I didn’t even think about it
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removed by mod
These people had years to migrate their accounts, were told to migrate their accounts, and warned to migrate their accounts because the old mojang auth system is insecure and needs to be sunsetted, and when it does, they will lose access.
They sat there and played the “no, I won’t move” game, and now they’re upset because the thing they were told for years would happen happened.
And they would have had to have no social interaction with any minecraft player on any online platform and in real life in all those years, as well as ignore every email from mojang, never look at the minecraft website, and so on, to not be notified.
I also get the feeling that Linux Fans would jump on the opportunity as well.
I basically agree with all of that, but it was totally possible to upgrade the auth system and keep it separate from Microsoft. Obviously Microsoft wouldn’t do that, but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?
I don’t think any company would want to keep a separate auth system if they can help it, though. No one wants to spend resources maintaining redundant account systems and interfaces between them when they have the option to consolidate.
But I suppose I just don’t see why there had to be a deadline at all. They know the email addresses associated to the original accounts, so there should just be a database they can reference to check if that email address has an unmigrated account and prompt to convert when next they log in. This is beyond “I don’t want to maintain two account systems,” it’s “Let’s just throw away this old table of email addresses so we can make more room on our servers for telemetry data.”
I bought Minecraft when it was first purchaseable. Only converted my account last month as my new-school-entrant kid has asked what it is.
And honestly, I wish I didn’t. The MS launcher is an absolute shit show in usability for adults, let alone kids. Next time it forces me to log back in I’m just pirating it.
I bought two copies, I’ll fucking run them how I please.
I’m amazed at how much better the official launcher is on Linux than on windows.
Windows:
Linux
I use the Modrinth App because it’s the place where cool people get minecraft mods now, and as a Minecraft launcher it’s a lot better - it uses an auth token system so you only sign in once with Microsoft’s website to connect the app to the login.
I bought the game at the of alpha with an email I lost access to at some point. I remember my Password and Username but forgot the email address I used. I think it also wasn’t even possible to change the email address in the Mojang Account back then. So I definitely didn’t sit around and ignored the migration, I even tried contacting the support.
Anyways what sucks is that I remembered my email address this winter, but already after the cut off point. Would have been nice to get to keep that very old account. But as others have mentioned, the experience is probably better with a pirated version anyway.
Welp, guess my account is gone. That’s kind of shitty but I bought it just out of alpha and realistically wasn’t going to play it again. And now if I ever want to I’ll just pirate it.
Haven’t they been warning about this for like a year?
At least three, as far as I can tell. Probably more.
Yeah I had been getting those emails for a long ass time
I looked through my email, they first asked me in February 2022.
I only saw the warning the first time it was announced, which I transfered over back then. But then I never heard of it again, so if someone happened to have been busy and missed it the first time it made headlines I could see how they could be caught off guard with how I completely forgot about it until it made headlines for it being discontinued.
For people that didn’t transfer right away, like me, I got so many emails telling me to transfer the account. So people that didn’t transfer right away, stil got plenty of notice
That doesn’t matter. You don’t get to just unlitaterally revoke something people paid for because they didn’t want to sign up for an account at a company that was unrelated to Minecraft when they bought the game. This should be illegal.
What was the original license that people paid for? Is there anything in there that would protect them?
Clearly not , which only makes the point. Consumer protection for digital products is weak and needs reform.
That doesn’t matter. If you buy a house and miss a sentence buried in page 2,784 of the agreement that says that the previous owner can arbitrarily decide to take the house back whenever they feel like it, that still won’t hold up in court. Digital products need to work the same way.
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