Minecraft Weekly Wrap Up - December 11th

It’s been a busy week in Minecraft with a major security vulnerability, the first Minecraft Now stream, and plenty more.

With that, here’s everything you may have missed from this week in the world of Minecraft.

“Log4j” Minecraft Security Exploit Stirs a Panic

A new Java security vulnerability has led to users in Minecraft possibly facing a data breach across the Java Edition.

This vulnerability reportedly allows for remote code execution via messages in Minecraft.

This news comes from Mojang who put out several updates for Minecraft to try and combat this vulnerability to prevent what some expect could’ve been as big as the Equifax data leak of 2017.

For users who haven’t yet, it’s important to close out of your Minecraft client to download the latest update geared toward preventing these security problems.

While the damage of this software issue has yet to be revealed, it could be substantial, and may well not be closed off just yet.

For those hosting their own Minecraft Java Edition server, Mojang recommends the following:

• 1.18: 
  • Upgrade to 1.18.1, if possible. If not, use the same approach as for 1.17.x:
• 1.17: 
  • Add the following JVM arguments to your startup command line: -Dlog4j2.formatMsgNoLookups=true
• - 1.12-1.16.5: 
  • Download this file to the working directory where your server runs. 
  • Then add the following JVM arguments to your startup command line: -Dlog4j.configurationFile=log4j2_112-116.xml
• 1.7-1.11.2: 
  • Download this file to the working directory where your server runs. 
  • Then add the following JVM arguments to your startup command line:        -Dlog4j.configurationFile=log4j2_17-111.xml

Minecraft Now Mojang Livestream Premiere

The announcement of a new livestream called Minecraft Now featuring the development team at Mojang came with little clarification for what exactly fans could expect each month.

With the first stream now behind us, here’s where you can check out the first Minecraft Now. This stream featured a ton of content across unique Minecraft playthroughs, skill competitions, community creations, developer insight on upcoming features, and community highlights as well.

This stream is a great way to get to know the devs behind your favorite game and also see what’s abuzz around the community/what’s coming next to Minecraft. 

With that, you don’t want to miss it!