Mods/Installing OptiForge/Manual Install/Fresh

This guide will help you install the latest Minecraft Forge and OptiFine.

Step 0. Finding your .minecraft directory
Before you begin you must find your .minecraft directory. This directory will not exist if you have not run the minecraft launcher at least once. This tutorial will work from within this folder.

In many Linux file managers dot files (files and folders prefixed with a period ".") will be hidden. In Nautilus press ctrl+h to toggle the display of dot files.

Step 1. Download Minecraft
First you must download a copy of vanilla Minecraft. You can either choose to use the Minecraft launcher or download it manually.

Option A. Using the 1.1.1 (5) Launcher (Easy)
1. Download the official Minecraft launcher from here: https://minecraft.net/download and then open it with Java. In some Linux distributions you must first set the file's executable bit if opening it with xdg-open.

2 (Optional). If you want to use a specific version other than the latest version, click "Edit Profile", then click on your desired Minecraft version from the drop down menu labelled "User version". Save profile when done.

3. Press play. This will download a copy of your chosen Minecraft version. You can then exit out of Minecraft and continue.

Option B. Download manually
1. Select a Minecraft version you wish to use. The version string will follow the format of either "1.6.2" for a full release, or "13w26a" for a development snapshot. For a complete list of versions see http://s3.amazonaws.com/Minecraft.Download/versions/versions.json. This tutorial will use "1.6.2" as it's the latest version at the time of writing.

2. Download the Minecraft jar file. This will be located at " https://s3.amazonaws.com/Minecraft.Download/versions/ / .jar ", replacing " " with the version you chose. For 1.6.2 this will be https://s3.amazonaws.com/Minecraft.Download/versions/1.6.2/1.6.2.jar. Save this file to "versions/ / .jar" inside your minecraft folder, which would be "versions/1.6.2/1.6.2.jar" for 1.6.2. You will need to create these directories yourself.

Linux (using wget): wget -cO "$HOME/.minecraft/versions/1.6.2/1.6.2.jar" \ "https://s3.amazonaws.com/Minecraft.Download/versions/1.6.2/1.6.2.jar"

3. Download the Minecraft version json file. This follows the same procedure as above. Download the file " https://s3.amazonaws.com/Minecraft.Download/versions/ / .json " (https://s3.amazonaws.com/Minecraft.Download/versions/1.6.2/1.6.2.json) and save to "versions/ / .json" ("versions/1.6.2/1.6.2.json")

Linux (using wget): wget -cO "$HOME/.minecraft/versions/1.6.2/1.6.2.json" \ "https://s3.amazonaws.com/Minecraft.Download/versions/1.6.2/1.6.2.json"

Step 2. Copy to a new Minecraft version
1. In your "versions" directory, create a copy of your selected vanilla Minecraft version ("1.6.2") and give the copy a new name. The name of this folder will be the name of your new Minecraft version. For this guide we'll use "1.6.2 OptiForge"

Linux: cp -R "$HOME/.minecraft/versions/1.6.2" "$HOME/.minecraft/versions/1.6.2 OptiForge"

2. You must also rename the .jar and .json files to match. Rename the new "1.6.2.jar" to "1.6.2 OptiForge.jar", and "1.6.2.json" to "1.6.2 OptiForge.json".

Linux: mv "$HOME/.minecraft/versions/1.6.2 OptiForge/1.6.2.jar" \ "$HOME/.minecraft/versions/1.6.2 OptiForge/1.6.2 OptiForge/1.6.2.jar" mv "$HOME/.minecraft/versions/1.6.2 OptiForge/1.6.2.json" \ "$HOME/.minecraft/versions/1.6.2 OptiForge/1.6.2 OptiForge/1.6.2.json"

Your directory structure will now look something like this:
 * .minecraft
 * versions
 * 1.6.2 OptiForge
 * 1.6.2 OptiForge.jar
 * 1.6.2 OptiForge.json

3. You now need to modify the .json file and replace the old version name with the new one. Open the json file in your favourite modern text editor. It is strongly recommended to not use Windows Notepad.

4. Look for, where "1.6.2" is the vanilla version you chose to start with. Change the 1.6.2 to the version name you chose:. Save the file when you're done.