Paper for MC 1.14

5 October, 2022

Minecraft 1.14

Minecraft 1.14 released with new content and many system changes under the hood. Internally, this was actually a very large update. Many systems have changed. Chunk management, lighting, entity tracking, and a whole bunch more have been changed. Many of these changes seem to be technical improvements over the existing systems. Unfortunately, it appears that many of these systems were not thoroughly tested before release. This is not even factoring in all the typical “new release” teething problems that occur as features and APIs are updated. As a result, 1.14 is not a recommended update at this time.

We recommend all servers wait until Minecraft 1.14.1 is available before even considering updating or deploying to production.

We are largely focusing on getting all our existing patches tested and stable during these first few weeks and while we may fix the occasional vanilla issue, it is unlikely we will fix all the issues plaguing vanilla 1.14. Which is why we recommend skipping MC 1.14 and waiting for 1.14.1.

@electronicboy took the lead on this update and received significant help from @Spottedleaf and other contributors. Feel free to thank and throw tacos at them.

We will provide updates and recommendations on this post and on Twitter 167 as we get to the MC 1.14.1 release which is expected to be soon.

The downloads page on the main site will not be updated until we feel 1.14 is in a better place. Downloads for these new, unstable, development releases of 1.14 will be available on the downloads API mentioned in this post 521.

If you choose to run 1.14 you need to know you will experience problems. If you report those you need to do your due diligence. Does it occur on Vanilla? Does it occur on CraftBukkit? Does it occur on Spigot? The team is already going to be very busy trying to fix and improve the software. Bad bug reports just slow everyone down. This release is being treated as a testing/development release. We expect you to actually try with your reports. Failure to do so may result in your report being closed.

Paper 1.12.2 Support

As many of you know, we have been supporting the Paper 1.12.2 release with applicable bug fixes as we find them. Paper 1.12.2 has been feature-frozen for some time now. The decision was made to continue supporting 1.12.2 because we were not happy with the overall state of 1.13 at release, and while it improved it never got where we thought it should be.

We had hoped for a smoother 1.14 release. For a while there it looked promising. Obviously, that is not what we ended up with.

Luckily, 1.12.2 has proven to be a very solid release and we do not get many tickets from it anymore. As this release cycle goes forward and 1.14.1 releases and is polished you can probably safely expect 1.12.2 to slowly lose support from us. That being said, it is a stable release and you should not rush to replace it with anything you are not comfortable with. We hope that over time 1.14(.1?) will be a proper successor.

Paper 1.13.2 Support

The 1.14 update and the above 1.12.2 support puts 1.13.2 in a weird place. Many of you are running 1.13.2 right now. You should not update yet. However, it is unlikely that we have the means or the time to continue providing it with feature updates. We may work on significant bug fixes for 1.13.2 but you should expect our focus to move to 1.14.

Our goal is to get 1.14.1 (or later just depending on how long this all takes to sort out) polished and at least at 1.13.2's level. Once that occurs, we will likely drop 1.13.2 support entirely but not before 1.14 is stable, ready, and recommended. You have time.

The long-term goals right now are to polish the 1.14 series of releases enough for users currently on 1.13.2 to make a quick and easy upgrade. Once that's done, we'd like to continue polishing such that 1.12.2 users can make a slower and more long term upgrade. All of this is subject to change however based on how long this all takes and what happens with vanilla and upstream releases.

1.14 is not ready and we do not recommend you update yet. We will update you as the situation changes.

Developers

There are API breakages from upstream in this update. It is not as bad as 1.13 was but there are notable breakages that you should begin looking at and figuring out what you want to start supporting and when.

This update does not require updating api-version in your plugin.yml files. api-version: 1.13 will work just fine. You can optionally bump it to api-version: 1.14 if you wish, however it will make your plugin no longer function on 1.13 servers.

This section will be updated as we get questions and if we notice anything else not being covered elsewhere.

You should also check upstream's release announcement 62 for other developer-relevant information.

Closing

1.14 is now available. 1.14 is not ready. We do not recommend updating your servers yet. We will alert you when this changes.

Thank you for all the support over the years. A special thank you to our contributors as well.

We are a small team of volunteers doing our best and we hope that we are living up to all the support we get from all of you.