Minecraft "Snapshots" - Weekly Minecraft updates from Jeb

Posted in minecraft

Jeb just announced that weekly updates of Minecraft will come in "snapshot" form. Regardless of whether there are bugs or not, these snapshots will be available to download from the usual assets area.

Snapshot file names

The snapshots will be named according to the following convention:

e.g 11w48

The first two digit number is the year e.g. 2011 in this example
The w is just a separator, implying the "week"
The second set of digits is the week number e.g. week 48 in this example

If there is more than one release per week then the snapshot files will look like this:

11w48a
11w48b
Etc..

What is a snapshot?

A snapshot appears to be a fancy name given to one of the pre-release versions of Minecraft. We've seen some of these before e.g. 1.9 Pre-Release 1, 1.9 Pre-Release 2. We're guessing that the term snapshot relates to the way Jeb is compiling the code and releasing it to the public domain. A snapshot may well be the results of an automated build program that Jeb runs.

For us gamers, the snapshot is the minecraft.jar file, which you can download and patch in the normal way.

This is the first Minecraft snapshot file to download:

http://assets.minecraft.net/11w47a/minecraft.jar