Minecraft Wiki:Issues

This page's purpose is to list all the bugs players have come across. Most of the single-player bugs also apply to multi-player.

Bugs and feature requests can now be logged at Getsatisfaction: Mojang.

General

 * If you have your Minecraft window open on full when you sign in the Mojang image will be out of place.
 * A glitch has been observed where, occasionally, a given area of blocks can revert to their original state, partially or completely undoing any construction or mining that had been done in that area. Usually this happens after a long excursion into one of the natural cave systems.
 * Seemingly related to the above glitch is one where a specific chunk will constantly revert. In chunks that constantly revert, water will not duplicate if it is flowing, and water tends to linger much like lava when the source is removed.
 * You are unable to directly swap items in your inventory when the two items are same. This is important if you would like to swap similar items with different durabilities.
 * Sometimes you can see through everything and it happens on all your games. Toggle the fog distance and everything will change back to normal (Default key is F).
 * Iron bars and saplings may not appear in the inventory when collected.
 * If you wait a lot of time after map chunks are generated and then continue forward causing the game to generate new map chunks, the game will generate weird structures which do not connect properly with the map. Sometimes even creating mountains which are, in a sense, cut in half. Furthermore, if one chunk ends in an ocean, and the other starts off with land with an underground cave in it, the water will not enter the cave.
 * When sand or gravel is generated above a cave (or any opening), it will float until a space by it is modified in any way.
 * Sneaking does not prevent the player from falling off of Steps or Soul Sand.
 * Sneaking prevents movement onto Soul Sand from any other block.
 * Holding the Sneaking button then pressing the key to pull up the menu and quitting will result in being one block lower when the save is opened again.
 * Since the November 10th update, there have been several performance issues in SSP. Save/load times have increased, sudden random FPS drops, and random crashing/freezing.
 * Occasionally, when saving the game and reloading, you will fall through the block you were standing on.
 * A bug exists where the game may refuse to remember custom controls after updating (not to a specific version - just updating in general). This is caused by one of the values in Minecraft's "options.txt" file being unset, usually the "lastServer" field - attempting to connect to any multi-player server address (valid or otherwise) typically resolves the problem.
 * Occasionally, some chunks of the map do not update with the day/night cycle, as seen here. This bug seems more common with chunks containing snow biomes.

Arrows

 * Arrows that hit doors can float if the door changes its state.
 * They also appear to float if they hit a fence or portal
 * Arrows that have not hit a mob become unobtainable if you die before retrieving them.

Bedrock

 * If you place dirt under bedrock, till the dirt then place the seeds, the bedrock disappears.(But you don't get the block)

Boats

 * When entering a boat on ground it will show a splash effect similar than on water.
 * When falling on a boat there is no fall damage.
 * If you manage to stand on your boat while it is under water, the boat won't move to any direction.
 * If you go under a water stream your boat will accelerate and rise upwards.
 * If you save and reload while in a boat, you will no longer be in the boat.
 * Pressing F5 whilst in a boat will show your leg/foot armor protruding from the bottom of the boat, even though your character is sitting.

Chests

 * Opening a chest whilst pressing a movement key, your character will continuously move in that direction until you open a chest again. This is also fixed by pressing the same movement key after leaving the chest menu.
 * Putting any item(s) in a large chest before quitting, opening it and putting the item(s) into your inventory, then pressing ALT F5 and opening it again will duplicate the item(s).

Doors

 * If doors are placed next to two stapled cactus-blocks, the door will immediately get destroyed and will drop two doors instead of one. One door can not be collected. If a door is placed next to two stapled and newly planted(small) cactuses, an uncollectable door will be dropped, and a door window frame will remain, which drops nothing.

Fences

 * Fences on top of blocks will have all faces on its underside black.
 * Occasionally placed fences will become invisible . They will become visible again if you place normal blocks near them though

Furnaces

 * If you exit your world while a Furnace is burning, when you re-enter, the Furnace's fuel will be full.
 * When destroying a Furnace, unlike Chests, anything inside the Furnace will be permanently destroyed.

Jukeboxes

 * Inserting a record and removing it before the song ends will cause the jukebox to eject a duplicate. Only one of the records will be retrievable, but the second will remain stuck in the world and eventually disappear after a certain amount of time. It is possible to abuse this bug to spawn hundreds of records.

Minecarts

 * When spawning mine carts on a small track, they will gain momentum from colliding with each other.
 * Having too many minecarts will cause the game to crash.
 * It is possible to gain neverending speed for a mine cart from abusing the bug by spawning many carts on a small track.
 * Riding in a minecart on above track may cause your player's image to disappear until you die or reopen Minecraft.
 * Sometimes moving minecarts disappear completely.
 * If you open your inventory while in a minecart, your player hand model will not function as expected.
 * Riding a minecart into a Nether portal causes you to become stuck.
 * Removing a minecart while riding in it will cause you to go through the ground, but only if the track is sitting on a block and air is all around it. If there is air underneath the block the track is on, this will cause you to fall through.
 * If a minecart enters lava, the client will freeze. If the player is in the minecart when it enters lava, the client will crash.
 * If you make a cannon that can fire a lot of TNT and then place a single track facing away from the cannon on the "firing spot" (the place where you put the TNT missile), put a minecart on that track and detonate the TNT while in the minecart, you will fly up into the air (if you have god mode on) and when you come back, you will find more than one minecart item near the cannon. This has only been proved in version 1.2.2 and before.

Mobs

 * If a mob is riding a mine cart and 2 or more mine carts get stuck in each other, after destroying or moving the carts away from the other carts the mobs will be invisible.
 * When up close to a Zombie Pigman, the inventory GUI will become much brighter.
 * If you are above a Ghasts height and are standing still, Ghasts will shoot fireballs over your head, without damaging you.
 * Fireballs launched by Ghasts fail to start fire.

Paintings

 * If a painting is placed and immediately removed, there is a chance that the picture frame will get duplicated.
 * If a block is removed from behind a painting, it will pop off the wall when a player touches it after a reload, even if it is a multi-block painting and there are other blocks still behind it.

Portals

 * Placing a boat in the portal and entering it will cause the game to skip the "safe area" finding algorithm. This means that you will appear in the Nether world exactly where you are meant to regardless of blocks in the way. Example video.
 * Being killed in the Nether will cause a portal to be generated near your relative location on Earth, as though you had teleported back from your "final resting place" normally.
 * Riding a minecart into a Nether portal causes you to become stuck.

Reeds

 * Reeds can be placed on blocks that are not grass if placed on a water block. Example: http://imgur.com/AWW9b.png

Signs

 * Placing a sign on top of a block that is placed at the maximum allowed building height in the world will cause the client to crash.

Snow

 * Snow currently does not fall, meaning that once it's destroyed it will not come back.
 * Utilizing snow, one can place saplings and cacti on any block. The sapling will grow, however the cacti will break when they first grow.

Stairs

 * Attempting to destroy stairs will sometimes destroy the block behind them instead.
 * Stairs let light pass through.
 * Double-steps will only drop one single step when broken.

Water
(To clarify this a bit, on the surface, you are blocked from placing a block on yourself, underwater, this blocking does not exist).
 * While underwater, you are able to place blocks at the location of the player.
 * It is possible for multiple water currents to crash against each other and create an inescapable rip-tide. Not only will this rip tide hold you in one place, it will also throw you from a boat if you are sailing it.
 * While underwater, there a glitch allowing you to breath and see through water by placing blocks in proper ways. This video will show you how it's done

Lava
Example
 * When lava is touching the same corner as you it has a possibility of burning you.

=+ ^=

= is a block + is lava ^ is you

Note: This can also happen with water

World Select

 * On some Mac OS X Systems, the World Select screen will not appear at all, making the game unplayable on those Mac systems, in other cases, the Mojang Specifications will appear green and the title screen and the game in dark areas will appear red.
 * In dark areas some sides of tile blocks will not render making a see through cave and grass in daylight will appear purple, water in darkness will also not render. This has only been proved with Mac OSX "Tiger."
 * Once the player has entered The Nether, the save file will appear as 0.0 MB (or something similar). Some worlds will even have negative file sizes (such as -0.02 MB).

General

 * If a player has respawned, he can place blocks on the block he is currently standing on. This will not decrease the block count in his inventory, effectively cloning blocks.
 * If a player dies and disconnects without respawning, upon rejoining, they will be invisible and invulnerable to damage. Items cannot be picked up by the player, nor can hostile mobs hurt them. Entering a minecart will crash their client. A heavy-handed workaround is to delete the players .dat file from the world/players folder. A more elegant solution is to have the player log off and use a program like [NBTEdit] to edit their health to a positive value. If their health is 0 or lower they will be in this "ghosted" state.
 * Full server world saves do not reliably save the entire world. This can be proven on a single person private server with whitelisting enabled when attempting to do a full server save via:
 * 1) Disabling incremental level saving with 'save-off' on on minecraft console.
 * 2) Forcing a full save to disk with 'save-all' on on minecraft console.
 * 3) Archiving and saving the archived world with 'tar -xvzf save.tg world' on shell in secondary system console.
 * 4) Turning back on incremental level saving by doing a 'save-on' on minecraft console.
 * Enormous, cuboid areas of unfinished map open in random places. Caves, minerals, water, magma and mobs are visible when a Player peers into one of these voids. These areas cannot be walked on, causing a "[user] moved wrongly!" message to appear in the Server, however, Players can ride minecarts through them with relative ease.
 * Blocks do not give items immediately when they break.
 * Mobs and other players will not take damage immediately when they have been attacked.
 * Mobs and other players movement is lagging. They can suddenly attack without making an attack animation.
 * Hitting a mob a few times in a row makes the mob to leap high.

Arrows

 * Arrows shot onto a wall cause the arrow to create a flickering wobbling repeat of the arrows movement. This happens mainly on glass.
 * Fired arrows will appear to come out backwards at first, then continue on a regular trajectory.
 * After firing an arrow, any other player will see a repeating rapid arrow fire at the state the arrow was fired. However, the arrows will not collide and damage anything. They will be gone if reconnecting.

Chests

 * Destroying a chest will spill its contents and every item in the chest will be duplicated. Only half of the items visible to the player can be picked up, so no items are gained nor lost in the process.
 * The disappearing seems to be caused by the same bug just in the opposite way. Instead of the server lagging behind the client and telling it that the item is still there the server will erroneously delete.

Doors

 * When a door is placed, a door will appear in the world but will stay in the players inventory, making it possible to spawn infinite doors.
 * If you try to use /give command to give a door to a player, the player will receive just the lower half of the door. If the player places it and breaks it, it will drop a normal door.
 * When attempting to stack doors, one will be deleted.
 * If you put two iron doors next to each other and add any mechanism to open both of them, the right one will be open all the time and close when you activate the mechanism.(verify)

Fishing

 * The fishing line is invisible.
 * Sometimes when fishing you won't get a fish when you right click to catch the fish.

Food

 * When eating an any type of food, it appears again to the player but disappears when player uses any inventory screen. It can be eaten but does not heal.

Furnaces and Coal

 * Coal can smelt 8 items per lump. However, in some cases, smelting a multiple of 8 items will use up all the coal, but leave one item without smelting. When cooking Pork, the furnace will not take any more coal after having burnt the first lump. The player has to close the furnace window and reopen it to continue cooking. The furnace will continue to show the fire animation after this, even when empty. Also, the animations in the furnace window (arrow showing progress, fire icon when consuming the fuel) seem to be broken as well.
 * If a player moves too far away from a furnace while items are inside, all items will be lost.

Fences

 * Stepping on a fence is counted as an illegal operation. Any player who walks on a fence will get stuck on it. It is possible to jump off by using well-timed jumps, although this takes several tries.

Inventory

 * The last inventory slot (bottom right) is overwritten by the active hand slot on logout/login; this is caused by an array-length error in the server code.

Minecarts

 * Inventory placed in Storage Carts will not persists past logout/login, other players can't see the inventory.
 * Engines consume coal but do not move under their own power, making them useless.
 * Disconnecting while in a Minecart will create a duplicate of your character upon logging back in.
 * Minecarts that pass over pressure plates will sometimes not activate a redstone current, even though a "click" noise is heard.
 * A player will pass through the minecart, but when the player is passing through it counts as "pushing" the minecart.
 * (November 24th update) When riding a minecart a long distance, sometimes the minecart will disappear as you reach the boundary of a chunk.
 * Empty/Storage Minecarts start to behave strangely when they are too far away from the Player. They disappear completely, disappear until Players disconnect and reconnect, or suddenly stop on tracks despite having sufficient momentum.

Mobs, Hostile

 * Shooting animations (Ghast fireballs, Skeleton arrows) are not visible and don't play any sounds.
 * The Ghasts' fireballs occasionally do not explode, only lighting a small area on fire.
 * Zombie Pigmen do not attack when hit.
 * Sometimes spiders freeze in animation and can not be hit. They disappear after about 2 minutes.
 * Some mobs are invisible. A scenario would be that a Creeper explodes next to you, making no sound and dealing you no damage but damaging the ground.
 * Some users are reporting mobs will be invisible, but can still attack you. On update 11/24/2010 SMP health update post Notch explained that to see invisible mobs, players must set their difficulty to the server side difficulty or higher.
 * Upon death, all monsters around you will be frozen when you come back. you cannot kill them, or attack them, and they cannot attack you. You can however push them, touch them, and they will still make noises. Skeletons, and Zombies will catch on fire, and it will flicker and not cause damage.
 * During severe lag, you can be killed by mobs or players without ever seeing them.
 * Mobs and other players will not take damage immediately when they have been attacked.
 * Mobs and other players movement is lagging. They can suddenly attack without making an attack animation.
 * Hitting a mob a few times in a row makes the mob to leap high.

Mobs, Neutral

 * Mobs frequently glitch in the ground, making noises and blinking. You can try burning them to stop this problem.
 * Sheep can be sheared, and the cloth blocks dropped can be picked up, but the sheep will still have the un-sheared appearance.

Paintings

 * Paintings might disappear some time after being placed.
 * If they are destroyed after being placed, they cannot be picked back up and will continue to drop paintings each time they're clicked.
 * You cannot see other players paintings.
 * When copying an SSP world onto an SMP server, paintings are removed in the transition.

Portals

 * Will appear to activate, but do not transport a player to the Nether. Not a bug, just not implemented yet

Sand and Snow

 * Sand will not fall down if snow is underneath it.

Stone Buttons

 * In addition to not triggering doors, stone buttons may jump from the wall they are actually placed on to the one opposite upon being pressed the first time if there is just one block of air in between. They can then not be removed reliably without also removing the block to which they are attached.

TNT

 * TNT disappears when ignited by a redstone circuit.
 * TNT lit by one user cannot be seen by another. The explosion animation and sound will also only work for the user who ignited the block.
 * Occasionally, a TNT block meant to drop will enter a repeating fall animation (but not actually fall) when lit. When the TNT finally explodes, it will explode at the position it was placed.
 * Occasionally, a TNT block can also explode twice.

Trees

 * Planting a sapling and waiting a bit will sometimes yield tree trunks with weird distributions of leaves, and in some cases, no leaves at all. Trees can also grow but be invisible, making it impossible to traverse a tree farm after a while. Rejoining the server appears to make invisible trees visible again and fire will swiftly cause phantom foliage to be made manifest.
 * Foliage from trees will overwrite some blocks(such as a nearby fence)
 * Placing a torch on foliage does not make the 'pop' sound for the item being placed.

Water

 * While underwater, there a glitch allowing you see through water by placing blocks in proper ways. This video will show you how it's done. It will appear as if you can breath under water and your breath meter will disappear, but you will still drown.

Wheat Seeds

 * Crouching/Sneaking over tilled soil does not prevent it from becoming trampled. Same goes for planted seeds, etc.
 * Occasionally, patches of planted seeds will revert to a regular dirt block without any physical contact.

Boats

 * Boats greatly increase server lag.
 * If you ride a boat over a chunk of water which did not load properly ( ex. the water is really there, but you can't see it and can see through the whole world ), the boat disappears.
 * You can ride boats onto land but of course very slowly.