Crash



Crashes are unexpected shutdowns of Minecraft, generally caused by unhandled "exceptions" while running the game. When Minecraft crashes, it typically closes immediately, though it may show an error report marking the location of the exception that caused the crash instead of closing. A sign of a server crash during gameplay is a "Saving chunks" or "Shutting down internal server" screen.

The most common causes of crashes are mods, pre-existing bugs, and updates. Attempting to modify the files of Minecraft or individual worlds, even with advanced editors, can also cause crashes. Crashes can also be caused by bugs in the game. Crashes can sometimes cause the corruption of save files if the player is not careful enough. Because of this, it is highly recommended that the player regularly keeps a copy of their save folder (located in the %appdata%\.minecraft directory on Windows systems or ~/.minecraft/ in linux and also /Library/Application Support/minecraft on macOS), to reduce their losses should a world become corrupted as a result of a crash. Large TNT explosions can also cause crashes.

Crashes used to have an error report screen, but that feature has been removed. Yet sometimes, an error report can quickly flash right before the game closes. Minecraft occasionally does this on startup, except it stays there, not allowing the player to play the game. A tutorial exists for obtaining the report file generated by the game when it crashes so that the player can share it for diagnosis.

Mods
Crashes can easily occur due to bugged mods (particularly unfinished mod versions (alpha/beta), much of Fabric mods under certain conditions, etc.), mod conflicts (particularly in older Minecraft versions when mods used a config file to determine item/block IDs and they weren't changed by the end-user), or wrong versions of mods (for example, many of the 1.7.10 mods are not compatible in Java Edition 1.13 due to the data values changes introduced by the Flattening, but almost all mods for Java Edition 1.16.2, 1.16.3 and 1.16.4 can run on Java Edition 1.16.5, as Java Edition 1.16.3 and 1.16.5 are minor updates with just minor fixes).

If the player has installed several mods, if using the older launcher, they should try renaming the "bin" directory in the Minecraft folder, then start Minecraft (Or replace the current minecraft.jar with a clean minecraft.jar from either a clean backup, download a jar file from the internet or force update the game should cause the player to get a new clean jar file.). A new bin folder is created. The player should remove the problematic mod. Now, the player should install each mod they desire one at a time, starting Minecraft and assuring that there is no crashing for each mod. Once the crashing starts occurring again, the last mod installed is likely the problem, or another mod simply does not work with it. Either way, the player should either remove the mod they determined to be causing problems, or repeat the first step, except without installing the problematic mod.

Incorrect Java version
Recent versions of Minecraft require significantly newer versions of Java than versions prior to 1.16. Older versions could run on Java 6, 7, or 8, while the newer versions require Java 16 or 17. Recent Java versions broke the backward compatibility that existed up to Java 8, introducing breaking changes that stop older programs from running on newer versions of Java. If the incorrect version is used, the game will crash during startup due to Minecraft attempting to use functions and commands that aren't in the Java version the game is expecting to run on, or in later versions, crashing when it detects an incompatible version of Java.

The incorrect version of Java may be used by unofficial launchers, such as MultiMC or CurseForge, incorrectly detecting the wrong version of Java for the game version, or defaulting to a Java 8 installation which Minecraft 1.17 and later is not compatible with, or Java 16 or later for 1.16 or earlier. Manual configuration is required to get the launcher to use the latest compatible version of Java for the Minecraft version being played.

Hardware problems
Problems with the player's computer's hardware can also easily cause crashing, or buggy behavior. If this is the case, it's likely that they are experiencing problems in other, unrelated games as well. If Minecraft is the only game experiencing issues, then it is unlikely to be a hardware issue.

If the player is indeed experiencing crashing or visual corruption in other games as well, the first thing to check is whether their computer's vents are blocked, or clogged with dust (which inevitably occurs over time). Dust or vent/fan blockages can cause overheating, which may not be severe enough to cause problems during normal computer use, but during more intensive activities such as gaming, the temperature may spike. If the player is using a laptop, they should make sure any vents on its sides or bottom are neither blocked nor filled with dust. For a desktop, the player should check obvious fan locations for blockages, and use a flashlight to peer inside the case. If there is much dust, or any internal fans appear to not be spinning, the player should either take their computer to a repair shop for a "tune-up" (mention that the player suspects there is overheating problems), or read a few tutorials online related to computer cleaning (note that a computer's internal components are highly sensitive to damage from ESD (Electrostatic Discharge, basically a static shock), so it would not be difficult for the player to accidentally damage their computer).

If the player's computer appears to not be suffering from overheating related issues, another cause of game crashing could be a damaged component, especially either the RAM, or the video card. If the problem just recently started occurring, and the player has not recently installed any major updates or software such as Anti-Virus suites, the player may want to take their computer to a shop to have it tested, or they can do it yourself using tools such as "memtest86+", "Furmark", etc. (however these tools tend to require a medium to large amount of computer knowledge).

It should be noted that even if the player's computer meets the basic system requirements of Minecraft, there is a possibility that their hardware might have unique issues, one being the use of Intel GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) cards, known for issues with OpenGL. However, if the player's graphics card is one of those cards, they can still play 1.7.10 and 1.8.

Software
Though unlikely, unrelated software can conceivably cause crashing in games such as Minecraft. The most likely candidates are User Account Control (Windows), Gatekeeper (macOS), various types of Anti-Malware (i.e. Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware, Firewall, etc.) software, which could either consume enough system resources to choke other resource hungry applications, or could cause issues as a result of their "Heuristic" real-time scanning. If the player recently installed an application such as AV software, they should try disabling it. If Minecraft stops crashing, they know the AV program is the perpetrator. The player can either remove it (not recommended for security reasons), or configure it to ignore Minecraft's folder and executable. If they are unsure of how to, they can look up some tutorials on the Internet. Alternatively, system processes can often consume a lot of resources (most infamously Windows 10). If there is too much system overhead, there is really not much one can do besides attempting to disable those processes or switch operating systems. Another certain crash is to set all the files in the .minecraft folder to read-only.

JVM Crashes
JVM crashes occur when the Java Virtual Machine, the program that runs Minecraft itself, crashes. These are almost always caused by doing large, potentially groundbreaking operations like moving many blocks, exploding a lot of TNT, or other memory or processor intensive activities, and additionally almost always are caused by running out of RAM. These are unique in that the crash message is quite different, having come from the JVM's crash handler rather than Minecraft's handler. Because of this, they do not generate a crash report in the .minecraft/crash-reports directly, but rather one directly in the .minecraft folder, with name "hs_err_pid.log" where  is the Process ID of the JVM at that time. Additionally, these crashes cannot be stopped by mods that "catch" Minecraft crashes, like VanillaFix.

For certain development versions, certain blocks with extreme data values such as overgrown cocoa, wheat, melon and pumpkin stems may cause the game to crash due to the invalid block rendering, particularly development versions from 13w02a to 13w09c and from 14w10a to 14w21b.

In Java Edition 20w14∞, certain biomes in the generated dimensions may cause the game to crash, depending on the seed, due to exceptions in Java, such as "bound must be positive" and "Exception generating new chunk". However, they are exceptionally rare to find the crashing biomes, since most dimensions do not contain the crashing biomes generated near the center of the world.

Manual initialization
The player can also trigger a crash manually by holding and. This is used for debugging, and is the safest possible crash. On some computers, pressing  enables the F3 key.

Ticking entities
Rarely, a ticking entity may also crash the game, either vanilla (particularly in certain development versions) or modded.

Ticking block entities
The rarest type of crashing possible is that of a ticking block entity. However, ticking block entities from buggy mods are very easy and common.

Old versions
Minecraft Indev might trigger a NullPointerException when generating a new world of the size "huge". Some versions might not start and throw an exception instantly.

Server-caused crashes
It is very rare but possible for a server to cause the client to crash (particularly some of the buggy mods). Crashing a server using the world height limit crashes both the server and client. If a server has too much lag, it might randomly crash the client multiple times until it stops lagging.

Witty comments
Witty comments are phrases shown at the top of crash reports generated using the process shown earlier in this article. They do not show on crash screens and are similar in nature to splashes. They can be changed by changing the player's minecraft.jar .class files. They are selected using the system's time in nanoseconds.

Hopper
Hopper is a non-publicly viewable crash report utility, operated by Mojang, which manages, stores and maintains crash reports, originally exclusively for technical Minecraft troubleshooting. In 2019, its help articles were moved to https://minecrafthopper.net and all Hopper pages are redirected to the new site. This new site is maintained by the community and contributions are welcome in its repository on GitHub.