Deciding which version of Minecraft Java to play. (AKA, what's your favourite update?)
In my comment on this thread, I briefly explained my grievances with modern minecraft updates, and said that my long-term world was on version 1.1 from 2012. Since then, I reset my computer and accidentally nuked that world along with the rest of the data I didn't care about. After a long while of kicking myself over having no backup (a problem I have since remedied, thanks for the backblaze suggestion @greg!), it's time to suck it up and start a new world. The only problem is that I don't know what version of the game to start the world on.
Obviously, I can update it later if I really want to, but I found myself loving the simplicity of 1.1 (one wood type, small but epic worldgen, simple biomes, etc.) and missing the comforts of later versions (crafting shortcuts, detailed settings, controller support for my steam deck through the likes of midnightcontrols or controllable). With this in mind, if you're partial to a particular update and it's feature set, pitch it here! I know this sounds weird, but I want to hear about why you like the version of minecraft you play, maybe there's perks of newer versions that I haven't thought/heard of.
EDIT: for anyone returning to this thread, I landed on version 1.12.2 for a two main reasons:
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It has good server & client performance (compared to 1.13 and 1.14, which are notoriously poor), meaning I can run a singleplayer server for cheap (paper, ~$3/mo for 1gb ram, runs basically perfectly) and have parity between my steam deck and PC. Steam deck basically sips power while playing, which is nice.
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It's about the time that I stopped paying attention to updates. Anything past the aquatic update is a blur, so I can enjoy the simplicity while still getting some good qol features.
If you haven't been keeping up with all the updates and additions to the game, I'd personally grab the newest version and explore the world without looking anything up. I feel like that would give you some of the same feelings of mystery and exploring the unknown that earlier versions of minecraft had.
Edit: Just wanted to add on, you should come check out the Tildes minecraft server, even if just for a look. We've done a lot of impressive things this time around!
+1. I'm partially biased towards new versions in no small part due to the tildes server and the datapacks and qol mods we use, but the way I personally play Minecraft I just think newer versions are always better.
Personally I view the game as a kind of sculpture medium and each update adds more tools so it's a no-brainer. I couldn't have made my favorite build ever (the strange towers in the pit beneath the museum) without those specific pinks and reds and oranges: mangrove and terracotta and such. Nor could I make the builds I do without modern farms to accelerate resource gathering. I guess maybe I'm not the target answer-er for this question because despite playing the game for like 12 years I don't have Minecraft nostalgia and I don't understand the preference for a smaller sandbox that a lot of people seem to have. Is it that limitations breed creativity?
For me, the core fun of Minecraft is the building, and the building will always be more expressive and varied in newer versions. Simple as that really
I agree with some of what was said re Minecraft as a medium, except with an entirely opposite conclusion.
I used to be a heavily modded player and last time I tried some of the recent versions I found myself missing varieties of biomes and creatures and other such elements I had gotten used to.
And sadly there's many mods that I remember sort of growing into Minecraft with that stopped updating after some major Minecraft rework some years ago interrupted forge or something.
So it's probably 50/50 between going some years back for a heavier pack or still remaining probably two or so years behind for a less heavy collection.
I don't really think my advice will land for you, but you also said:
So here's me. If your world is from 1.1 I don't expect this context to be news for you, but I'll include it anyway for posterity.
I started playing in Beta 1.3. I remember my first world spawned me in a taiga right next to a beach - Spruce and Taiga were still "new" from Beta 1.2 released the month prior. I got to use the new bed to sleep through my first night. A couple weeks later, 1.4 released and added Wolves.
So for me the new blocks and mobs from those few months of Beta has always been the most nostalgic for me. Smooth stone, stone bricks, spruce, wolves, skyblock.
Pistons came out in beta 1.7 and got me interested in redstone. It was also a really fun era where it felt like Mojang was really listening to and engaged with the community; Pistons was originally a mod that was added to the game in a more limited form. So that interest in the more technical side of the game has kept me engaged for the last decade, to lesser or greater degrees as time goes on.
Specifically about technical minecraft, here are those features I find most interesting and the versions they come from.
I'll always be nostalgic for the big technical projects from those few years when I started playing. I remember friends and I building a big enderman farm with tripwires and pistons to push the endermen down through many many layers into a collection area at the bottom. And we struggled through learning the mechanics behind the complex door-based iron farms.
Nowadays, you build a tiny enderman farm with a platform of leaves that vastly outpaces anything you could build with pistons back then. Or you can build an iron farm on day 1 by digging a hole. Granted, that one won't outpace the old complicated farms, but the new features make it easy to do so with a bit more effort.
In some ways, it makes me sad. All that old effort is obsoleted by some new feature that makes it trivial (or greatly simplified or broken). But the tradeoff is that each new update adds so many new features that let you do crazy stuff. One of my favorite tricks was the ravager launcher, but it only worked in a few versions.
Some broad categories of technical minecraft I've enjoyed that have come about since that era:
Major spoilers for the latest update, if you're concerned about that: Cubicmetre's latest video. It uses a lot of the above (and more) for a really cool vanilla survival project themed around Helldivers 2. Best I can tell, the only non-vanilla component is a custom music disc to play the Helldivers theme song while the machine is charging up, but this is done by a resource pack (like texture pack with sounds) and not by a mod.
So all this to say: I like playing on the latest versions. I have nostalgia for Beta and the technical projects from that era, but all the new game mechanics that have come over the years make the modern projects far more interesting.
If I had to pick a best update: 1.11's observers are the thing I can't live without, but Beta 1.7's pistons always hold a special place in my heart.
Something around 1.18 or 1.19 probably has the peak of "amount of technical stuff you can do", although the new updates are still adding impactful features.
For example 1.21 allows you to take minecarts and ender pearls through portals, so I expect new transportation tech to come about from this. And 1.21.2 makes ender pearls act as chunk loaders, which is why I'm now interested in experimenting with wireless stasis chambers. The wireless receivers will automatically be chunk loaded!
I loved Beta 1.7 just for the huge availability of mods it had. There are a few really neat mods from that era that don’t (or didn’t for a long time) have modern equivalents and haven’t been updated in a while. At the very least, there were a lot of big mods from 1.7 that were never all up to date at the same time after that. I think it’s gotten better now, and it seems like a lot of old classic mods have been remade, but I still have nostalgia for 1.7 because so many mods died out after that for whatever reason.
It also felt like realism was much less of a concern back then, it was more about just making something fun and seeing what you could do with it. Which is a philosophy with its own pros and cons, but mostly it’s just a different vibe which is itself kinda fun.
In my opinion Minecraft Java edition has only gotten better with every update. The new content keeps the world fresh and exciting and is really well done. I normally play through every year or two and honestly, Java edition may the most impressive and deep game world ever built. I can't wait for the revamp of The End.
My 7 year old singleplayer world was on 1.12 for many years and I consider that version as the standard MC experience. It is very well optimized and without the bloat of newer versions. It's a shame I updated to 1.17 and built many things there as I wish I could go back and play in 1.12.
1.12 is the earliest version of the game that has a working controller support mod, which is nice.
My main problem is with mending and the elytra nullifying mining and travel respectively, which are both present in 1.12. I'm not the kind of player that likes to artificially restrict myself, and prefer that features aren't accessible to me at all, so I picked a super old version so that I could take my time. Maybe it's time I stop trying to optimize my experience, and just try to have fun... the elytra has been in the game longer than it hasn't at this point.
I like to think that elytra has a very specific, very important alternative purpose in the game: To accelerate the abandonment of a playthrough. I don't mean that in a derogatory or negative way either. No playthrough can ever really last forever. People crave a beginning, middle, and end to a story/experience. IMO elytra punctuates the ending of Minecraft by opening up the world to travel as you please. Sort of the "and they lived happily ever after" that comes right before "the end".
That's a good point. That said, I love the idea that since a minecraft world is n-billion blocks wide, a singleplayer world could functionally be played forever... or at least a very long time. You could abandon your base, fly 20,000 blocks and do almost everything up to the ender dragon as if you had started a new world.
I actually had an idea rolling around in my head for years for a datapack/mod that would add this mechanic to the game. In it, you would essentially create a one way portal that would strip you of any belongings and teleport you very far away and reset your spawn. I thought it might be cool to play a "new game", but still have the (slim) chance to eventually come across my own old builds.
Maybe someday I'll get around to making it (or someone will come across this and beat me to it :D)
I think I started playing around 1.7ish, but it was mostly setting things up for my kids at the time. Minecraft in that form didn't really grab me.
We then updated to 1.12 and got into mods, and that was fun. 1.12 has a very big modding community, and there are a lot of fun things to explore. I will take this opportunity to promote my favorite modpack of all time: Uncle Genny's 100% Organic & Free-Range Modpack. I think I've pitched it at length elsewhere, so I'll let the description speak for itself in this case. It's delightfully weird and creative.
1.13 was the first update to vanilla Minecraft where I started to see the appeal of the base game. Oceans before that update were very bland and lifeless, and exploring by boat is now one of my favorite parts of the game. 1.13 broke a bunch of mods, though, so at this point I got more into bukkit/paper/spigot plugins, which were fun. There were lots of cool things you could do with plugins to enhance the game while still enjoying a vanilla experience. We had a family server called the multiverse with many different flavors of world that we could teleport between. All the worlds had different rules, and different builds. One was in outer space on a giant freighter. Another world was a fantasy sky world with infinite elytra and rockets. Another was all ocean, with an underwater laboratory. Still another was a giant world, where you could put on a mouse costume and scurry around a giant house hiding under the bed and sneaking between the walls. My kids were more into creative at the time, so we had a lot of fun with it.
1.16 was another important update, because it overhauled the nether. I love the new music added in this update. Seriously, I still will straight up stop playing and just listen wheneever So Below starts playing. Gives me chills. The new wood types are great. The Piglins are great. The 3D biomes. So many great additions that made the nether a place you might actually want to visit. Modding also picked back up in 1.16 as mod authors started to make use of some of the under the hood datapack and api changes that were getting added. My second favorite pack Enigmatica 6 came out around this time. Too many cool mods to list in that pack, but anyone that does should for sure check out Astral Sorcery. It's a mod that never made it to more modern versions, which is a damn shame. So many fond memories of searching the night sky for constellations, and taking in the beautiful animations and sounds.
After that, I mostly switched back to vanilla in order to stay up with those updates. There were enough interesting things being developed with datapacks and server plugins that I could sort of get my modded fix while staying up to date with vanilla. My longest running world was updated all the way from 1.13 to the latest 1.21, and everything works fine. Mojang made some changes to chunk generating/loading that made it possible to move to newer worlds that have bigger world heights pretty seamlessly, so I have been able to keep it going. I would say you aren't really locked in to a given version, if that's a concern.
Minecraft worlds come and go, as this excellent video by Any Austin illustrates. The best thing you can do is load up a new world (in any version) and have some fun. :)
So many incredibly complicated mods never made it past 1.12 . RIP, OpenComputers.
I want to reinforce 1.12 as a recommendation for a worthwhile flavor of modded Minecraft.
For vanilla I'd just go with the latest.
For modded it's sort of an even split for me between 1.16 and 1.12. I love the additions that came with the Aquatic and Nether updates so much that it's hard to play 1.12 now without missing those elements. But for sure there are a ton of great mods that didn't make it out of 1.12 that I miss.
As for OpenComputers: I never played, but maybe something like CC:restitched could scratch a similar itch? The drones mentioned also remind me of Pneumaticraft.
A very nostalgic update for me is 1.13, I spent lots of time playing that version on the PS3 as it was the last update the legacy console editions ever received. I like it because I think it's a good mix between the convenience of more recent updates and the charm of old Minecraft, it's got the old textures but a lot of the niceties of modern Minecraft. I love playing older versions, I've spent lots of time on 1.7.10 and beta 1.8 but the swimming in older Minecraft is just... ugh.
1.8 is my "nostalgia" update, because I played a lot with friends and family around that time, but you're totally right about swimming, 1.13 was a huge improvement to movement, and marks what I think of as "modern minecraft", especially with the 1.14 villagers & (personally disliked) texture update that came after.
1.7.3 beta and the latest are what I run.
1.7.3 is fhe last pre-Adventure update, and I like seeing the stream of stuff come in on my "mainline" world.
I wasn't playing during beta, so I have no nostalgia for anything pre-release. There's a very loud minority that claim that beta is the last "true" version of minecraft, but I could never quite get into it.
Interesting about having the old version and the new version is two worlds, which do you play more?
I play more beta slightly out of nostalgia, but mostly because I prefer the simplicity of it. I felt like they started adding too much not too far after and got overwhelmed by the mechanics. I could do something like Luanti (fka minetest), but the games I would play range from too far (minetest-game) to not-quite-right (MineClone 2, now VoxLibre). I like the constrained experience I guess, it just feels like a tighter gameplay loop.
That's how I felt about my 1.1 world, but I think it was a little too constrained for me, hence the post.
It's funny that you say this about post-beta, when that's how I feel about the post texture updates, which came 5+ years after.
I've been wanting to get Minecraft after my brother took his account back he gave me in alpha specifically to play this version. It's what I spent the most time playing and I enjoy the pure sandbox aspect of the pre adventure update.
I've heard good things about Better than Adventure as well, but I'd probably play vanilla 1.7.3 for awhile before diving in. Though for some reason I thought 1.7.6 was the last 1.7.x version.
If I had to pick any update to play a casual run of, I’d pick whatever the update before the combat update.
I miss Sword blocking as well.