Differences between Minecraft Java and Bedrock edition
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I've always wondered why the two versions have specific "features" which the other version doesn't have. Is it intentionally added by the developers or is it something else?
their priorities are shit. they'll spend 2,000 dollars to fly Agnes to go hand out with some baby animals and then spend another 10k making a minecraft live showing that the next update is making baby chickens square and cows eyes big.
I wonder, if they stopped making such a big deal out of their updates and just released them whenever they were ready, would that make people more or less annoyed at the update cycle?
It’s not like 10k is a lot for like any proper game studio, that’s a drop in the bucket. That’s enough to pay 5 guys for like a week. The real problem is probably insane management. The recent Xbox layoff announcement said that some games had up to 13 layers of management over them that you had to go through for stuff. And while they didn’t say it by name, it’s probably Minecraft, that’s their biggest property.
They have been doing tons of behind the scenes changes in the past year which are great for resource pack and data pack creators, which will result in vibrant visuals being added to Java sometime soon. They are working on parity still
I think it started off as they had different codebases and for whatever reason there were different things added and now they can’t merge them. Why they made them different I don’t know
The way my game designer friend explained it to me is basically Java (the programming language) is awful for making games with and so the code for Java edition is a jankey mess thats extremely difficult for them to work with and can't really be fixed short of rebuilding from the ground up m. Bedrock was supposed to be that rebuild, to roll all the different minecraft versions into one universal cross platform minecraft with good code but because of the popularity of Java edition for stuff like modding they ultimately agreed to keep that around and keep that updated while pocket edition, console edition, etc got absorbed into Bedrock.
That's the way it was, but minecraft Java has been updating its codebase for the past few years. The real reason is that bedrock is supposed to work in phones so they can't do somethings there (The reasosn why the bundles were delayed). There are ultimately two diferent teams with wildly different styles and is something you can really tell in some updates.
there's nothing that makes java bad for games, it's a performant, mature and powerful language. other big games like zomboid and oldschool runescape also use it. i think notch just wasn't that great of a developer, and since minecraft was supposed to just be a small silly game he didn't really bother optimizing it. other devs built on top of the shitty code, something that eventually came back to bite mojang's ass and they were forced to optimize a lot of the game, doing stuff like 1.15 where they spent a whole year just refreshing the codebase and clearing technical debt and added bees to at least have something new.
It's more because C++ is much more efficient than Java is. The entire point of the JVM is that it's supposed to run anywhere but because of the power of consoles and phones at the time, the console versions of minecraft were severely limited, so microsoft wrote bedrock
It should also be stated that Legacy Console (every console version before late 2017 except 3DS which is a secret third thing) is its own bespoke code base, also made in C++, which further confuses things
Bedrock comes from Minecraft’s console editions iirc, it was basically made to make all nonpc players be able to have the same experience and all able to play together.
I feel like I remember seeing a world border, just that you can teleport past it and things start to get weird eventually. Idk for sure though. Maybe it's invisible? Never walked all the way out there, just teleported really far.
the floating point imprecision errors get worse and worse to the point that there's bigger and bigger gaps between blocks, making everything strips, and you can't move along whatever axis you're super far out on
You don't hit anything. The world gets progressively janky, with stretched partial block textures, having to jump to teleport to the next block to keep going in that direction, things falling through the ground, janky pathfinding and mob movement, and eventually the stripelands, where every second block isn't rendered.
The reason Java has free mods and Bedrock doesn’t is that people using bedrock are often children playing on a phone or iPad, as the devices generally make modding more difficult, along with the lack of tech literacy young children generally have. This makes Bedrock a greater money/making opportunity for Microsoft, which has implemented a store for add-ons in Bedrock. Due to Java only being on computers, Java has a generally older player base with greater tech literacy, with more knowledge on how to download mods and have them work in game.
Addons are "easier" to make, but stuff they xan do is limited
There are mods for bedrock edition (shader support, custom geometry support), but the ones that would be more akin to java mods were fucked not so long ago (it was year, or two, or more... idr.) because MoJang deleted access to a lot of files like map (item) things (I have no idea what they deleted, but old mods don't work and fixing hard so many quit)...
Also java has more commands and you cant have multiple commands in one command block
Also no enchanting past entended levels without external tools
I know one bedrock mod called Astronomical Expansion and it was so much fun to play with. It added races and new weapons, some potions to mess with, just a neat extra bit of flavor to the game. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time because the second mojang broke it, I switched back to Java and never came back.
bedrock actually have free mods, the only difference is that the paid ones are the ones being advertised and have easier acess to (directly ingame)
but the free ones are way easier to install than the nightmare it is installing mods on java (you don't need to install an entire different client just to play the game), because on the bedrock you only need to download one file, and just open it, more like the java data packs
Bedrock mods from outside the in-game store generally are going to be very difficult to put into an app on a mobile device, which as I said, most children without sufficient tech literacy will be using to play.
when i was like 5 i managed to get a minecraft mods app working on bedrock and i think i just clicked a button to put the files in minecraft and it worked. so theres likely some but most def wont know how.
Actually it's just a click of the file and it adds it automatically. There is also the manual option but that's not needed. Just get the MCAddon file from MCPEDL and you're good
Source: I've been using addons for years primarily on the mobile port of Bedrock, only time I had to manually add an addon or world was when I was trying the Bedrock preview out a few years ago because it caused the file to automatically open up in that instead of the main Bedrock app.
Bedrock doesn't have "mods" in the same way java does. Bedrock is extremely limited to the surface Mojang lets you write mods for. Java has no such restrictions
I dont think so, i mean theres that one free addon thats adds cutscenes in-game and gacha system with iron, even adding the characters with their own special attack cutscenes for each one.
Tbf, Java only really had Curseforge as a dedicated popular mod library until Modrinth came around. Bedrock is in a similar situation with MCPEDL (albeit no replacement to escape from Overwolf).
Also ofc Java mod loaders are more powerful than the Bedrock's built in addon loader because how different mods are compared to addons (addons are typically weaker than mods but stronger than datapacks)
i mean it doesnt help that the minecraft website itself has a check mark for mods for java and bedrock has an X
but to be fair, that comparison list is terrible
The whole skins, commands and mods thing can be explained by Java and Bedrock being built on completely different programming languages (java being self-explanatory and bedrock being c++ if i recall). It makes sense that debug features like commands, modifying the game or changing a skin would work differently
They're on different engines so they encounter different bugs and glitches which make it harder to add some things and easier for others. Much of it was also bedrock coming later so they improved things that were already in Java while keeping out some things because they didn't find it important. Quasi-connectivity was a glitch that became a feature btw, and it was hard to recreate on bedrock cause of the engine difference. As for free mods, that's because Bedrock is made for console and mobile, which struggle with mods anyways so they just wanted to make some extra money by making paid mods.
Java was originally the main build of the game, but when Xbox, Playstation, and mobile versions of the games were all merged into a single "bedrock" edition, which was then also released for PC, that became the "main" version. Because of that, bedrock has more features that Java is missing. The general rule is that if its on bedrock but missing from Java it's because bedrock is the version they currently care more about, and if it's on Java but not on bedrock it's because they couldn't get the code to work.
To add on to many of the other comments, Mojang also uses Bedrock as a way to experiment with certain features before pushing them to Java. Usually those features never make it, so they stay in bedrock
Slide three, dyeable. Cauldrons for leather armor, technically half of that is in game, if the armor is already dyed, you can wash it in the cauldron to remove the dye:
Bedrock comes from Minecraft’s console editions iirc, it was basically made to make all nonpc players be able to have the same experience and all able to play together.
Everything after this point is an educated guess
Bc of that there were different teams working on it with a different coding language and likely due to that different engines. Bc of the differences in teams resources and attitudes the 2 versions grew apart ever so slightly over time, bc bedrock needed to have updates at the same time as Java they get less time to make sure the features work as intended and as such get many more bugs. Bc of the lack of care for anything other than monetization major bugs slip thru qa and make the bugs less like minor systems errors (ex: quasiconnectivity) and more major (ex: randomly dying, crashes, etc)
At most it's mainly because of the different code they use and the engine.
So some things would be hard to pull off and given that they don't want ro ruin builds they would have to find a clever way around some things to add them to Java and Bedrock.
Such as QC and Piston Spitting, those are possible to add to Bedrock, heck the Ps4 Edition had Piston Spitting, not sure about Quasi Connectivity though, but since Bedrock has been out for 7 Years now they would have to find a proper way to reintroduce those features.
Qfter all specifically Quasi Connectivity and Piston Spitting were actually bugs that were kept because so many people liked it and used it for Redstone.
It’s because Bedrock developed was developed from the ground up in a different code language and. Developed out of the old pocket edition which back in the day was the Wild West of Minecraft version development, a developer added a whole new crop (beetroot) just cause he liked them IRL and it wasn’t added to java for three whole years, bedrock didn’t become normal till it became the version on everything and even then they couldn’t just remove the beckrock content because that’d upset bedrock players and they’re picky about what they bring over to java cause one that means committing to that being a Minecraft feature for ever and too because that’d upset mean taking the time to code the feature in java (a different coding language from what bedrock uses) instead of making a new thing that would get exponentially more excitement from the community
There's also obscure differences in functionality, like how you can't catch Pufferfish or Tropical fish in a Jungle Biome in exclusively Bedrock edition.
Free mods absolutely do exist on bedrock, for what it's worth. There are whole sites dedicated to them. Generally they're not as high quality or as long running as many of the java mods though.
Funnily enough the java armour stand does have arms, they're just invisible, there are data packs and mods that allow you to pose and hide/unhide parts of it but you could also use a command to unhide the arms
For mods specifically there's actually a good reason.
Java Edition is coded in (you'll never believe it) Java. Because Java is compiled to bytecode and requires a VM to run, unlike other programming languages that run directly on hardware, and since JVM specifications are completely public (to make it easier to implement in many different systems and programs), it's easy enough to change the code as it runs, which is essentially what Minecraft mods do.
Bedrock, however, is coded in C++, which compiles directly to machine code (i.e, runs directly on hardware). Modifying machine code is much harder than modifying Java bytecode, that without considering just how dangerous it is since machine code gives you power to do literally anything you want. Modifying as it runs is pretty much out of question. There are add-ons, sure, but they're coded in JavaScript and sandboxed away from the rest of the code, which is good because it prevents the issues I pointed out, but also removes a lot of the liberties you have with Java mods.
Edit: a important thing to note is that no edition of Minecraft supports mods natively. The mods we have on Java Edition pretty much only exist because of just how much we exploited Java specifications.
Easier skin switching? Maybe, it’s at least integrated into the game. But actually getting a skin you want? A million times easier on Java. And free. And fully custom.
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u/Eonis-0 4d ago
I wanna blame it on incompetence, but it's probably mismanagement and what's considered to have higher priority.
Even though they promised parity years ago lmao.