Minecraft 1.9 Roadmap

Hi Everyone,

As has been indicated by Mojang’s recent update notes, Minecraft 1.9 is starting to take shape and approach the final release phase. Judging by these notes, and allowing time for pre releases etc, we estimate that it is probably about a month up until release. With this in mind, we need to give you some information and plans about the intended release path for our second major Minecraft update. We have been busily tracking snapshots as best we can since July and hope to have something out at the same time, or just after the official release of 1.9. Without knowing specific dates, the development plan continues forward as follows:

1. Bring snapshot branches up to date with current master branch, as well as current snapshot releases.
2. Perform testing in a similar manner to 1.8.
   1. This time the server will be community managed, and anyone is free to make changes to plugin configurations! https://github.com/SpigotMC/SpigotCraft
3. Repeat steps 1-2 until pre-release.
4. Update to pre-release and publish draft API.
5. Update to official release, and release development versions of Bukkit, CraftBukkit and Spigot.
   1. API may (unlikely) be broken between here and final release.
6. Release stable version to all BuildTools users around the time of 1.9.1.

We will also be doing some needed updates to the API, some of which will be breaking or backwards incompatible. At this point in time they include:

Bukkit

• Removal of Painting*Event
  • Replaced by Hanging*Event since October 2012
• Removal of ContainerBlock
  • Replaced by InventoryHolder since March 2012
• Deprecate ItemInHand
  • Replaced by ItemInMainHand and ItemInOffHand
  • Defaults to ItemInMainHand
• Remove support for non UTF-8 compliant plugins
  • Should only affect noncompliant plugins on clean installs and those upgrading directly from 1.6 -> 1.8. Any plugins written for or run on 1.7 and 1.8 should be compliant.
• Deprecate Boat API
  • These API features have been only half working for several versions now. They are no longer guaranteed to work at all in 1.9.

CraftBukkit

• Removal of SpecialSource build time remapping for ambiguous methods.
  • Plugins not updated since 1.6/1.7 may have issues running if they use these methods. It is possible to “upgrade” such a plugin by manually running SpecialSource on this plugin.
• Upgrade MySQL library version
  • No compatibility issues expected
• Upgrade SQLite library version
  • Downgrading a plugin from 1.9 to 1.8 may not work as expected. Since Minecraft itself doesn’t support downgrades, you are expected to keep full backups of both plugins and worlds.
  • Latest SQLite version for Java seems broken.

It’s not all doom and gloom, there are also some tasty new Bukkit API additions.

• Glowing Entity API
• BossBar API
• AreaEffectCloud API
• Particle API
• Zombie Villager Profession API

Notes for NMS developers
NMS has always been an unsupported way of accessing Minecraft’s internals, and should be substituted with appropriate APIs where possible (why not open a pull request or issue if the API you need doesn’t exist), but for 1.9 we are going to make a few more things clear:

• NMS code may be broken in any way shape or form at any time.
• Such breaking changes will not necessarily result in a package version bump.

As such, if you write NMS code, it is your responsibility to ensure that it fails gracefully. Please also pay attention to the copyright concerns of interacting directly with Mojang code.

See you soon,
~Spigot Team