If you’re interested in revisiting Minecraft from the Beta era, here are some notes.
MultiMC is a third-party Minecraft launcher that allows you to have multiple separate instances of Minecraft versions, with a great interface to manage it. It isn’t required, but I’d recommend using it.
Playing on 1.7 itself
It is trivial to use play Minecraft 1.7.3 itself. The official launcher & MultiMC can be used to easily spin up an instance.
My primary issue with playing older versions of Minecraft is the janky mouse input: it frequently skips & accelerates unnaturally, making it difficult to control.
Back2Beta is a mod for Minecraft 1.7.3 that adds a number of fixes to the game, without changing the core gameplay. If you’re going to play this version, this is a good mod to install.
It does have raw mouse input support, but it doesn’t work for me.
Playing the latest version, with old features
It turns out people have replicated significant portions of old gameplay onto modern Minecraft.
Moderner allows you to generate worlds with the generation from Beta 1.7. Nostalgic Tweaks brings back old gameplay features, such as pre-Adventure health.
1:1 Beta is a mod pack combines these mods, and others, to create a faithful 1.7 experience.
This has yielded the best results for me. The modern engine gives you better performance & reliable mouse input, but the mods make the experience near indistinguishable from Beta 1.7.3. Additionally, should you want to mix and match gameplay between versions (i.e. adding sprint with old health), you can do so.
Some notes (written for 1:1 Beta 2.1.3, downloaded from Modrinth using MultiMC),
- The default option in world generation is vanilla. Make sure to modify it to Moderner, and to tweak the custom options in the mod to disable deepslate generation.
- In Nostalgic Tweaks, you’ll want to fix sheep punching behaviour (it seems to think you want shears enabled),
- Dripstone still spawns at lower levels.