Still Faithful

What it is

Minecraft beta 1.7.3 with the polish later versions brought while the game stayed beta. Still Faithful is Old Faithful (beta as it was meant to work, on Pure Faithful) plus changes of its own. Nothing new to collect or craft.

• Dusk and dawn glide smoothly, without beta's steps and the wave of the landscape redrawing at each one.
• Chests face you when you place them and pair as in later versions, under one lid; stairs drop themselves, leaves you place stay, and glowstone drops by hand.
• Shift-click works in dispensers and furnaces too, and puts armour on.
• Wooden tools, bows, signs, doors, ladders, boats and other wooden things burn in a furnace, as in later versions.
• Boats steer as in later versions, A and D turning them and W paddling the way they face, a little faster than beta's; they break only in a real crash and settle on the water instead of bobbing.
• Holding the attack button goes on hitting only what you clicked, not the animal behind a block you've just mined.
• Minecarts bump and push each other on every track, not just east-west.
• Animals you've sheared, milked, saddled or ridden stay; wild ones still come and go.
• Skeletons shoot from their eyes, as in later versions, so a tunnel two blocks high no longer keeps their arrows off you; elsewhere they hit you standing about as often as beta's.
• Squid swim on just under the surface instead of bouncing against it.
• Blasts, dropped items and other small things show from further away.
• Lava cut off from its source thins out instead of lingering, and saving no longer pauses the game.
• Skins made for later versions show whole, as a modern client draws them, slim arms and all.
• Fences are a post with arms to their neighbours, as in later versions, so you can stand against one and walk past its corner, and each line of chat has a dark bar only as long as its text.

Each change has a switch in the game's Options, so you can have beta's behaviour back. Smooth dusk needs OpenGL 2.0 and has so far been tested only on NVIDIA graphics: if the sky or the landscape looks wrong, set Dusk to Beta.

Already playing beta on Fabric? The mod works on its own too: see using it in an existing instance.

With optional mods on top, all on and each with its own switch: More Faithful.

Privacy

Still Faithful sends nothing to its makers; there's no server of ours. The game talks to Mojang to sign you in, and to the servers you join. On its first start it also fetches beta's own bow and door sounds from an archive of beta's files kept by Modification Station, a community of beta modders; its README says how to turn that off.

For developers

• Source code on GitHub
• All downloads, the mod on its own, and the server