Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition

Posted by SteveHawk27 10/29/2025

Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition(www.minecraft.net)

1027 points | 464 commentspage 3

James_K 10/29/2025|

I wonder what Minecraft sales are like these days. I'd imagine most of the people who are going to buy it already have. Makes me wonder if they'll ever open the whole thing up.

smlacy 10/29/2025|

Just think of the untapped market of fresh 9 year olds who've never seen/played the game before. It's infinite, there will always be more people who have never played Minecraft.

James_K 10/30/2025||

They're playing Roblox and Fortnite these days, both free of course.

lurk2 10/30/2025||

Where are you getting that from? Minecraft has been comfortably above 100,000,000 monthly active users since at least 2019. The only comparable figure I can find for Fortnite claims 650,000,000 registered users, which doesn’t seem remotely possible unless at least half of them are bots. 650,000,000 is something like 1/12th of the world’s entire population. The Roblox figures I could find showed just under 400,000,000 MAU in 2024, which also seems completely beyond the pale.

James_K 10/31/2025||

So anyone who reports higher numbers than Minecraft is lying, but Minecraft's numbers are all accurate? You have literally just invented a conspiracy theory to affirm your biases around this matter.

Also note that monthly active users for Roblox and Fortnite equate to monthly revenue, whereas I doubt there are as many people buying Minecraft in-app purchases.

lurk2 10/31/2025||

> So anyone who reports higher numbers than Minecraft is lying, but Minecraft's numbers are all accurate?

Minecraft has made press releases detailing active player counts (“Up to”139,000,000 MAU in 2021). See here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210809155838/https://news.xbox...

This does claim that 238,000,000 copies have been sold but that there are 400,000,000 registered Minecraft players in China (this would be about 1/3rd of the population so I think it’s probably a typo).

Epic is privately held so I suspect they wouldn’t bother reporting official player counts. Roblox actually does have numbers listed in their annual report, it just wasn’t showing up when I Googled it: 3.6 billion in revenue and 82.9 million daily active users. So that would put it within the wheelhouse of Minecraft’s playerbase, but still about 20,000,000 short.

It may well be that all the kids are playing it over Minecraft, though, since the document I linked above claims the average Minecraft player in North America and Europe is 27. I have no idea what those numbers look like for Roblox but from what I understand the playerbase has always skewed substantially towards minors.

> You have literally just invented a conspiracy theory to affirm your biases around this matter.

This was incredibly abrasive.

James_K 11/2/2025||

You can't compare daily and monthly active users. Monthly active users are can be many times higher than daily. Also, the numbers you are using for Roblox are two years out of date. Current DAU for Roblux is 150M [1].

> This was incredibly abrasive.

I reserve the right to be abrasive when people randomly decide to spread baseless claims.

[1] https://s27.q4cdn.com/984876518/files/doc_financials/2025/q3...

bityard 10/29/2025||

Asking from a place of sincere ignorance: TFA says the code was obfuscated from the beginning, and that they deliberately kept it obfuscated all these years, and acknowleded the huge community that built mods for Minecraft in spite of it. But what TFA doesn't say:

Why did they keep it obfuscated for so long even after it became readily apparent that almost everyone buys Minecraft to (eventually) play the mods?

Why did they keep it obfuscated even though they acknowledged it didn't really stop modders (or anyone else) from understanding the program?

What occurred recently that caused them to change their mind?

unleaded 10/29/2025|

"It does have some technical benefits for us, but it is a symbol that this game is not open source. You still can't publish the maps or the code decompiled, even using the maps."

https://twitter.com/Dinnerbone/status/1169242801508376582

huhtenberg 10/29/2025||

Ha, this explains then why MSFT dropped 4% after hours!

ilsubyeega 10/29/2025|

might be another issue: the azure outage

flykespice 10/30/2025||

Does removing obfuscation implies any performance speed-up for Minecraft Java, or were the obfuscations done in Java with zero-cost?

OkayPhysicist 10/30/2025|

The obfuscation in question was just name mangling, so it was probably ~zero-cost. Possibly slightly negative cost, depending on the relative verbosity of method names.

hshdhdh 11/4/2025||

https://vulcanocraft-plugin-v3.onrender.com/

zimpenfish 10/30/2025||

On the one hand, great; should hopefully mean the monkey-patching by mods isn't quite as fragile as it is once you get into a decent number of installed mods.

On the other, I'd assume this means that any official modding support is now stone dead and will never happen.

quitit 10/30/2025||

I haven't played minecraft in a fair while, but started with the alpha builds back when the Seecret updates were the most exciting thing going for the game.

> I'd assume this means that any official modding support is now stone dead and will never happen.

I was a bit surprised to read this because talk of modding support had been on the radar since notch days, it's wild to me that this hasn't happened yet.

movpasd 10/30/2025||

I suspect Minecraft was large enough to support an effective modding community from the start regardless of official support, so that there was always some kind of third-party unofficial mechanism (ModLoader, then Forge, then now Fabric and Quilt). Mojang probably punted it down the priority list because of that, or didn't want to impose a structure and kill those ecosystems. Technically speaking, Java is reasonably easy to plug stuff into at runtime, so that was never a barrier.

The original issue with official modding support, from my perspective, has always been a legal one. But the Mojang EULA explicitly allows modding now. So I would see this decision as one in a long line of decisions by Mojang to both normalise the legal relationship with modders, and beyond that giving a "thumbs up" to the community.

rbits 10/31/2025||

It's been dead already. There's datapacks but it's been pretty obvious they're not going to make an official modding API. I think they realised that the community modloaders are already really good.

So instead they have been structuring the code in ways that help mod development, and have been talking directly to the devs of mods and mod loaders to try and reduce friction with Minecraft updates.

time4tea 10/29/2025||

Proguard obfuscation, particularly when you get to aggressive renaming (there are a lot of valid characters for a java class or method), flattening, overloading and inlining, can make it very hard to understand what is actually happening.

Its great to make this step.

kachapopopow 10/30/2025|

minecraft had none of these, it only had clean and predictable name obfuscation.

time4tea 10/30/2025||

Super interesting to know. I wonder why they bothered!

Thanks for the info.

iqandjoke 10/30/2025||

Hope the rename would not cause unintentional file deletion accident like Japan one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734021

ReFruity 10/29/2025||

One of my favorite mods ever across any game is Create for Minecraft. It is well-made and polished, and sparked a whole ecosystem of mods that work with it. I wonder what possibilities the de-obfuscation can bring to that ecosystem.

nurettin 10/29/2025|

Maybe they should open source the loader instead of offering a solution to already solved problems so people don't have to resort to using third party loaders for on-prem gaming.

mmis1000 10/29/2025|

The game is still a licensed game though. You technically must pay it and go though proper verification to start the game. (Although it's a 100% public secret that how to load it as you want, and basically every single mod dev kit does that for local dev)

I guess Microsoft won't want to deal with the license issue of publishing the loader part.

nurettin 10/30/2025||

I doubt they care about this or that license. They just want people to upgrade.

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