A Better Mincraft launcher for Linux

A smarter way of managing multiple minecraft installations on Linux. It downloads and installs Minecraft version on demand, including all the appropriate libraries and assets. Pairs well with the minecraft server launcher for Linux.

• Minecraft versions are downloaded automatically if they are not already installed.
• Supports the normal (aka vanilla/mainline) and Forge Minecraft versions.
• Works with offline game profiles.
• Allows multiple versions, player profiles, and game mod configurations to be installed and run at the same time.

Running

Prerequisites: make sure you have the following tools installed: jq,unzip,curl, sha1sum

Running: ./start <version> <player_nick>

• To run a Forge version add a suffix "-forge" to the version, for example ./start 1.17.10-forge player1.
• To see what normal and Forge versions are currently available for installation, run the script with a non-existing version, like this ./start 0 player1, ./start 0-forge player1
• To create another game profile with the same game version and same player name, for example to try out different mods, specify a name of the new profile as the last argument ./start <version> <player_nick> <profile>

Troubleshooting

1. Force re-download by deleting the relevant minecraft version subfolder under versons and re-run ./start to download and rebuild everything. The player profiles is kept in separate folders, under profiles, so you can remove versions without removing player configuration.
2. If the step above did not work for a Forge version, remove both the Forge and the the corresponding mainline version folders under versions and run ./start again to re-download everything.

How to add it to the desktop

Download and install the minecraft icon

curl -O https://launcher.mojang.com/download/minecraft-launcher.svg
sudo install -Dm644 minecraft-launcher.svg /usr/share/icons/hicolor/symbolic/apps/minecraft-launcher.svg

Then edit minecraft.desktop to set the <version> and <player> you want, and copy it to ~/.local/share/applications/.

How to do reproduce manually what this launcher does

• Run the official java launcher. Login and start the game. The launcher will download all the required files for the new version. You can see them in this manifest.
• Find the native libraries in the process name with ps -ef | grep java.library.path. Then copy that folder cp -a /tmp/folder $HOME/.minecraft/versions/$ver/$ver-natives. The native libraries can be found here.
• Copy-paste the whole -cp argument from the java process, along with the java args to a run script. Run the script, plus assets, libraries, and version folder what you need.

To learn more about the files that Minecraft uses, see this page.