Java Edition version history/Development versions

Starting in the period between Beta 1.7.3 and Beta 1.8, Mojang began to publicly release testing versions of full updates in order to get major feedback, especially for bug reporting. This enabled the official updates to be considerably more stable. While these versions are public, they are not auto-installed by the game and are completely optional.

For instructions on how to install a snapshot, read this tutorial. A (?) denotes version's info here is guess-work, possibly incorrect.

Note: This is not a page for reporting bugs; they should be posted on the official bug tracker instead. For more information see the Issues page.''

Snapshots & Pre-releases
In Beta, these versions went under the tag of "Pre-Release", candidates subject to release for 1.0 as "RC#".

The weekly snapshots post-1.0.0 are named by using the format YYwWWx. YY is the two-digit year, w simply stands for "week", WW is the two-digit week number within the year, and x is a unique identifier – starting with "a" – for when there is more than one release per week. The new launcher will only download that version's development set of snapshots. All older snapshots will be stored locally.

In Snapshot 13w19a through 1.6 Pre-release and 13w38a through 13w41a, Erik Broes (_Grum) appeared in every snapshot 'cover picture' on mojang.com.