Troubleshooting guide
This guide provides some common issues that people may have when trying to play Minecraft, and solutions that they can use to fix such problems.
If you require further assistance with fixing your computer, please feel free to come along to the IRC channel called #minecrafthelp on esper.net, using an IRC client such as mIRC, xChat, or by using esper.net's web access to #minecrafthelp
No accelerated OpenGL mode
Problem
You try to run Minecraft and it says:
Minecraft was unable to start because it failed to find an accelerated OpenGL mode.
Cause
The video card drivers may be out of date.
Solution
Update your video card drivers
Problematic frame or pixel format not accelerated
Problem
The Minecraft launcher won't start and a file called hs_err_pid.log is created that mentions a problematic frame, or Java tell you that you have bad video card drivers due to pixel format not accelerated.
Cause
The above reports about problematic frame or pixel format not accelerated are caused by having out of date or bad video card drivers, which result in the graphics card not knowing how to handle certain OpenGL commands.
Commonly this is due to the graphics card being too old.
Solution
Update your video card drivers
Graphics driver update isn't effective
If your graphics card has less than 1 Gig of memory you may have to use a different graphics card. Minecraft has some minimum hardware requirements, among which are 1GB of graphics card memory.
You can still try to update your graphics card drivers from other sources though, if standard updates for your existing video card drivers aren't proving to be effective.
- Find out the name of your graphics card by running dxdiag (howto) and going to the Display tab.
- Once you know the name of your graphics card and its current version, you can then perform a web search for updated display drivers for it, by using a search parameter such as: "RADEON 9200 SE" driver update
- Look through the results for drivers with a more recent version for you to download and install. Be prepared to accept though that older graphics cards won't have more recent drivers.
Connection to minecraft.net fails, with HTML text up in the news panel
Problem
Cannot connect to minecraft.net when attempting to log in via the launcher, and HTML content appears in the news panel, for example:
<html><body><font color="#808080"><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><center>Failed to update news<br> java.net.ConnectException: Connection timed out: connect</center></font></body></html>
Cause
Java 7 is having trouble using IPv6 to communicate with minecraft.net
Solution
Tell Java 7 to prefer to use IPv4 instead of IPv6.
This can be achieved by creating a shortcut to the minecraft.exe launcher with those preferred settings:
PC instructions:
- Right-click on minecraft.exe and select "Create shortcut"
- Rename the shortcut if you wish to something else, such as "Minecraft with IPv4"
- Right-click on the shortcut and select properties
- In the Target field, replace the text with:
java -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -Djava.net.preferIPv6Addresses=false -jar minecraft.exe
Press OK to finish, and try out the updated shortcut
Update unable to complete
Problem
When the launcher tries to update Minecraft, the update isn't able to finish.
Cause
The reason why the update isn't able to finish is that the attempt to download the updated files is being blocked. This is most commonly due to an antivirus program mistakenly blocking some of the files, such as lwjgl.dll or other files.
Solution
Temporarily disable your antivirus program and perform a forced update.
org.lwjgl.LWJGLException: Could not create context
Problem
When the launcher tries to run Minecraft, a part that it needs isn't there.
Cause
The reason why Minecraft cannot start is that some of its files haven't been downloaded. This is most commonly due to an antivirus program mistakenly blocking some of the files, such as lwjgl.dll or other files.
Solution
Temporarily disable your antivirus program and perform a forced update.