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Posted: Mar 24, 2020 in Minecraft
By ApexHosting
Unfortunately, this past week some of you may have noticed you’re not able to login to your Minecraft server with older versions of Minecraft. This has been due to an outstanding issue with the way older versions work and Mojang’s support for their old legacy authentication servers. We’d like to go into a bit more detail as to what’s happening and some suggestions on what you can do.
Why can’t I connect to my server with old versions ?
So around the time version 1.7.10 of Minecraft released some of you may have remembered Mojang made a major change on how player identification and authentication worked. They switched over to a system that uses something called UUID. UUID stands for Unique User Identification. What this means is that they generate an alpha numeric code to identify you by rather than your username. The biggest reason for this change was security while playing online. Players were able to use hacked Minecraft clients to pretend to be other players by just taking their username and than would cause a lot of mischief and griefing on servers. With the new UUID system they could no longer do this as the server would check for that UUID to verify the player was legitimate. When they made this change they were not able to go back and retroactively update the code for 1.6.4 and older versions of the game.So they had to have two separate servers to authenticate players online. The legacy server and the current server. Currently at this time it seems the legacy server has gone offline and is having intermittent issues. Mojang did state in the past they had plans to no longer support this legacy version but didn’t make an official announcement as to when this would happen. Currently, at this time though through a bug report on their website which can be viewed here. That they are currently aware of the issues with the legacy server and plan to resolve it but don’t have an estimated time as to when it will be resolved. So while you can play these older versions in single player the server is not currently able to authenticate you for online play.
Is there any short term solutions ?
At this time our best recommendation is to try out the newer versions. We all very much love the older versions of Minecraft and a lot of the supported plugins, modpacks and more that can only be played on the older versions. However, there are so many fantastic new updates that have come out. The latest Nether Update snapshots have been fantastic and have brought so many new ways to play the game. We also have a wide variety of modpacks you can check out here. Also all of our mini games are up to date with the latest builds so you are able to play those as well which you can find here. We will say there is one way that you can play these older modpacks on your server but keep in mind this method does leave your server vulnerable to potential griefers.
WARNING: If you decide to employ the following method you are doing so at your own risk of having your server griefed and unwanted players joining the server.
As above with the following method your server can be potentially joined by unwanted players if you do this method. What you can do is go into your server.properties and set the server from online-mode=true to online-mode=false This will allow you to connect to a server without verifying your account with Mojang’s authentication server hereby allowing you to connect when playing these older versions. This does mean that other players are able to do this as well so it could bring unwanted players. If you do decide to go forward with this method we highly recommend you keep consistent backups of your world. In addition when your players are not currently playing you can re-enable online-mode=true or turn your server off so players cannot connect while you are away. Another thing is try to keep your server address private and only give it out to your most trusted friends and family members. We do not recommend hosting a public server using this method.
We hope this is resolved soon.
We know everyone at the Mojang headquarters is working hard to fix this and hope they are able to resolve this issue soon. If you have any questions that we not answered in this post feel free to contact our support team for further clarification. As soon as a resolution to this issue has been issued by Mojang we will be sure to post another update letting everyone know.
Until next time,