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Comment by Alex4386 | Hacker News Reader

"Minecraft: Java Edition" has been obfuscated since the release. < Classic Microsoft move.

No, It was obfuscated since around 1.8 when you (Microsoft) buy up Mojang Studios. before that? meh, It wasn't. That's the main reason why JE has broader mod ecosystem from the start., result being 1.7.2 being the one of the most active modded versions since most of them can't get passed to around 1.8.

The motive behind this is probably due to them finding out people can not get their mods/server software updated in-time (due to extra work required) and this leading people being really reluctant to update their versions.

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I learned to code by modding Minecraft, starting at ~1.6 a few years before the Microsoft acquisition.

It was definitely already obfuscated by then, the Microsoft acquisition had nothing to do with it.

If anything, looking back all the years, Microsoft has largely delivered on the promise to not fuck up the game and its community. They’ve mostly kept their hands off it, besides the Microsoft account stuff (which makes sense why they did it, but a lot of people are still understandably annoyed). Hell, they’ve kept up two separate codebases in fairly close feature parity for _years_. I doubt they’d have kept JE if there weren’t people in that team who genuinely cared.

Minecraft has been obfuscate since the start. Even 1.7 is still obfuscated.

> No, It was obfuscated since around 1.8 when you (Microsoft) buy up Mojang Studios. before that? meh, It wasn't.

Huh? This is not true. The very first version released in 2009 was obfuscated with ProGuard, the same obfuscator used today.

The reason Minecraft 1.7 was a popular version for modding was because Forge was taking too long to come out, and the block model system was changed in a fundamental way in the next update. Has nothing to do with obfuscation.

> The motive behind this is probably due to them finding out people can not get their mods/server software updated in-time (due to extra work required) and this leading people being really reluctant to update their versions.

Not really accurate. The Minecraft modding and custom server software ecosystem has more agility right now than it ever had in the past. In the past 5 years, a remarkable shift has occurred: people have actually started updating their game & targeting the latest version. Minecraft 1.21 has the highest number of mods in the history of the game.

1.7.10 is definitely obfuscated, and 1.7 had one of the longest "lifespans" of a Minecraft version.

The best thing to happen to Minecraft is 1.7.10 backporting; the second best thing has been breaking the Forge monopoly on modding.

(The code quality of mods back in the 1.7 days ranges from "pretty decent" to "absolutely horrendous" mind you.)

This is deliberate misinformation.

You can easily see that versions prior to Beta 1.8 were obfuscated just by downloading the .jar for the older versions on minecraft.wiki.

You can even view some of the old MCP mappings here: https://archive.org/details/minecraftcoderpack

> This is deliberate misinformation.

It’s disinformation if it’s deliberate.

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