So even if I download a new launcher.jar manually and put it into data/, it gets overwritten by a stale version on https://s3.amazonaws.com/Minecraft.Download/launcher/launcher.pack.lzma.
When I make launcher.jar readonly the updater fails. I see no option to tell it to not update.
I am also trying the new launcher, but it does not start (see MCL-12329).
$ java -jar Minecraft.jar --workDir data
Bootstrap (v5)
Current time is Oct 16, 2019 9:37:27 PM
System.getProperty('os.name') == 'Linux'
System.getProperty('os.version') == '5.2.9-1-default'
System.getProperty('os.arch') == 'amd64'
System.getProperty('java.version') == '1.8.0_222'
System.getProperty('java.vendor') == 'IcedTea'
System.getProperty('sun.arch.data.model') == '64'
Downloading: https://s3.amazonaws.com/Minecraft.Download/launcher/launcher.pack.lzma
Got reply in: 1051ms
Downloaded 1076,7kb in 4s at 255,8kb/s
Renaming /home/ensonic/Minecraft/data/launcher.pack.lzma.new to /home/ensonic/Minecraft/data/launcher.pack.lzma
Renamed successfully.
Reversing LZMA on data/launcher.pack.lzma to /home/ensonic/Minecraft/data/launcher.pack
Unpacking /home/ensonic/Minecraft/data/launcher.pack to data/launcher.jar
Cleaning up /home/ensonic/Minecraft/data/launcher.pack
Starting launcher.
[21:37:36 INFO]: Minecraft Launcher 1.6.89-j (through bootstrap 5) started on linux...
[21:37:36 INFO]: Current time is Oct 16, 2019 9:37:36 PM
[21:37:36 INFO]: System.getProperty('os.name') == 'Linux'
[21:37:36 INFO]: System.getProperty('os.version') == '5.2.9-1-default'
[21:37:36 INFO]: System.getProperty('os.arch') == 'amd64'
[21:37:36 INFO]: System.getProperty('java.version') == '1.8.0_222'
[21:37:36 INFO]: System.getProperty('java.vendor') == 'IcedTea'
[21:37:36 INFO]: System.getProperty('sun.arch.data.model') == '64'
Comments 7
Oh my! I found a fix.
Previous starter script:
cd $HOME/Minecraft/java -jar Minecraft.jar --workDir data
New starter script:
cd /home/ensonic/Minecraft/datajava -jar launcher.jar --workDir .
@violine1101 I did (about 10 times) but as you can see above the files at s3.amazonaws.com/Minecraft.Download/launcher/launcher.pack.lzma are outdated. My fix is to skip the outer Minecraft.jar and launch the launcher directly.
So why is the official launcher still downloading from it then? Why is the game even using a 2 stage launch method? It would have save me hours, if the instructions just told me to get rid of the first launch stage (or if the source code for the launcher would be at https://github.com/Mojang to figure what it is doing).
Because it is not the official launcher anymore. It was replaced by a newer version in January 2017, which uses the new URL. It's just still a thing because some old operating systems and linux distros cannot use the new launcher. It will cease to work at some point in the future anyway.
As for the other two questions, I'm not too sure, but the primary reason why there's a separate launcher is probably that it's just always been done this way, and that you can easily change what versions you want to play (and what mods to play with). Open-sourcing might be an option, but there's always a huge legal hurdle when it comes to that sort of stuff, and for a project that's no longer really supported that's just not worth it. But you would need to ask that question to Mojang, really.
You're using an outdated version of the legacy launcher. Download the new version of the legacy launcher here: https://launcher.mojang.com/v1/objects/eabbff5ff8e21250e33670924a0c5e38f47c840b/launcher.jar