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, so that the official update is considerably more stable. While these versions were public, they were not auto-installed by the game and are completely optional.

In Beta, these versions went under the tag of "Pre-Release", candidates subject to release for 1.0.0 as "RC#", and post-1.0.0 were given a name under a special syntax (see below).

To install a development version, simply download the minecraft.jar file, place "minecraft.jar" in your .minecraft/bin/ directory and run Minecraft as usual. For GNU/Linux, some extra work needs to be done to get the snapshots going.

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
YY is the two-digit year, WW is the two-digit week number within the year, and x is a unique identifier, starting with "a", in case there is more than one release per week, and "w" simply stands for "week".

Minecraft 1.4 (The Pretty Scary Update) Snapshots & Pre-releases
Because Mojang wishes to have fireworks in-game for New Year's Eve, but cannot complete the Redstone Update within that time period, they have decided to work in "several parallel branches of code", with the features of snapshot 12w49a being released before Christmas as 1.4.6, and the Redstone Update being released January or February 2013 as 1.5.

Beta 1.9 Pre-releases
Considered the "Lost Update", a full version under the name "Beta 1.9" never came. Instead, Mojang opted to delay the release of this update until MineCon 2011 and release it under the name "Minecraft 1.0.0". This decision was made after a few development versions tagged as Beta 1.9 were already sent out, so the name Beta 1.9 was kept for all of the development versions in the gap between Beta 1.8.1 and Minecraft 1.0.0, other than the Release Candidates.