Since Minecraft 1.7.2 was released on October 25th we've been putting in a ridiculous amount of work non-stop towards a CraftBukkit for Minecraft 1.7.2 and I am happy to finally be able to announce that we now have development builds available. We strongly suggest that you only use this build if you would like to help us get a Beta build out sooner and are experienced with using unsupported development builds.
WARNING: Minecraft 1.7.2 is an update that requires clients to update before being able to connect.
What is a Development Build?
A Development build is provided AS IS and COMPLETELY UNSUPPORTED. You should only be running these builds if you are completely aware of how to properly make use of them. Support requests of ANY KIND will be removed without warning. If you have to ask where or how to get the development build, you should NOT be running it and posts of that nature will be deleted.
Will plugins break with this build?
Minecraft 1.7 is one of...
Things are progressing nicely towards our first development build of CraftBukkit for Minecraft 1.7.2. Although this update did not provide or add as much feature-wise as previous Minecraft updates have, this is probably one of the more complicated and larger updates we've had to work with from a mod development standpoint. With "almost all of [the code in Minecraft] having been changed - be it little or big" (according to Mojang), there has been significant shifting around of code and logic - to the estimated tune of ~220k lines changed - within Minecraft, resulting in our slowest and most involved update yet.
Managing expectations - information about our initial CraftBukkit 1.7.2 builds
Five days ago (on November 10th) I sent out a tweet trying to describe what our initial findings were regarding the impact this Minecraft update has on the project but it's frustratingly very difficult to communicate...
A new CraftBukkit Recommended Build (1.6.4-R2.0) that provides Minecraft 1.6.4 compatibility is now available. As this new Recommended Build fixes an issue with structure saving in custom (non-default) worlds, updating is HIGHLY recommended.
Also includes these notable changes from 1.6.4-R1.0: Preventing potential structure (stronghold, fortresses, etc.) loss in 1.7
Along with a CRITICAL security fix, Minecraft 1.6.4 also contains a special fix for a problem that could potentially pop up in the future by enabling the saving of generated structures to disk. As such, it is recommended that everyone update to this Recommended Build and explore around the structures you wish to save. For more information on this feature and tips on how to save your structures (as well as a utility you can use to streamline the process), see this announcement.
Minecraft 1.7 introduces changes to the world generation code that could very likely result in structures (like strongholds and nether fortresses) generated in 1.6 no longer being recognised as valid. As this would mean that special behaviour for structures would stop working as expected (like wither skeletons spawning in nether fortresses, for example), we felt that it was important to give our Server Admins a heads up.
Minecraft 1.6.4 introduces a new structure saving feature that should ensure that structures generated before 1.7 continue to be recognised as valid structures after updating. If you don't want to lose your structures from 1.6, you need to update to 1.6.4 first and make sure the structures are saved.
What needs to be done
If you're planning to continue running your 1.6 world come 1.7 and want to ensure that structures retain their special behaviour as expected, there is an extra step you need to take as part of the update process....
