Minecraft: Java Edition has been obfuscated since its release. This obfuscation meant that people couldn’t see our source code. Instead, everything was scrambled – and those who wanted to mod Java Edition had to try and piece together what every class and function in the code did.
Modding is at the heart of Java Edition – and obfuscation makes modding harder. We’re excited about this change to remove obfuscation, as it should make it quicker and easier for modders to create and improve mods. Now you won’t have to untangle tricky code or deal with unclear names. What’s more, de-bugging will become more straightforward, and crash logs will actually be readable!
surprisingly fantastic and consumer friendly move from mojang, good on them


As did I :) The few times I boot up MC it’s the same old modpacks on the same old versions.
I too find myself returning back there :)
So many great mods died after this version that it was impossible to recreate the experience - and I feel bad for those who joined the party later and never knew what 1.7.10 (or 1.6.4, or 1.5.2 for that matter) has to offer.
It goes so bad that when I recently loaded a newer version, I was like “what the hell is going on here” :D
1.3 was another nasty one. That was the one where multiplayer and singleplayer were merged and LAN play was introduced. Before that mods were released specifically for either single or multiplayer and authors would have to specifically build 2 versions of every mod if they wanted to enable use in multiplayer. This shift killed a ton of mods and version 1.2.5 was a peak for mods like Red Power for example
If you use an alternate launcher like Prism Launcher it is trivial to install tons of modpacks for any version of Minecraft and manage many different mod loadouts (with handy search and auto-download of both modpacks and individual mods, plus it makes it super easy to modify a modpack you downloaded and add/remove mods) Its really the best way to play modded Minecraft (and has been since the fork from MultiMC) plus unlike most launchers which are super-simplified to not scare newbies, Prism Launcher also exposes tons of handy technical stuff if you want to dive deeper, such as optionally displaying full logs, java version and argument management, world edit and other tool integrations and more.
Duude. I was super big into reading all of the changelogs and learning all of the undocumented changes from the wikis for every version and preview from when I first started playing back in Beta 1.7.3 until around version 1.6.4 or so. Booting up modern… 1.20something? I can’t even remember whats currentish anymore…anyways I’m so lost and then I try to play like a Beta 1.7.3 player and everyone else just goes “the fuck are you doing?”