Java Edition version history/Development versions

Starting in the period between Beta 1.7.3 and Beta 1.8, Mojang Studios began to publicly release testing versions of full updates in order to get major feedback, especially for bug reporting. This enabled the official updates to be considerably more stable.

Mojang Studios generally releases snapshots on Tuesdays.[1] Previously, before the release of snapshot 14w26a on June 25, 2014, in the middle of development for 1.8, they were released on Thursdays.[2] During the period from snapshot 14w26a to release 1.21.5, they were released on Wednesdays.

These versions are publicly available, though they are not auto-installed by the launcher unless the Enable snapshots checkbox is ticked in the profile editor, and then it will only download the current version's development's set of snapshots and pre-releases. The player is able to change to other snapshots through the profile editor.