[GUIDE] Hating The New Minecraft Launcher? Read This!

So I've seen a LOT of complaints about the new launcher here on the forums, and I thought I'd give you a very good alternative for the standard Minecraft Launcher that'll make your life a whole lot easier and give you a quick tour of it.

MultiMC

MultiMC is a third party Minecraft Launcher made by Petr Mrázek (@peterixxx) and Jan Dalheimer (@02JanDal) for Windows, Mac OS and Linux. It was created to make it easy to have multiple sets of mods and to run multiple instances of Minecraft at the same time.

Before you start installing MultiMC, make sure you have Java installed. If you don't know how to do that, here is a great guide explaining that.

Installation & First Time Setup

IMPORTANT: This installation guide applies to Windows only!

First, you'll need to download MultiMC from here. Once you've done that, extract the contents of the .zip file anywhere you'd like on your computer. Run MultiMC.exe.

When you open the program for the first time, you'll need to select your language. After you've clicked Next, you'll be asked to select your Java version. If you have nothing in this list, you didn't install Java correctly, so try reinstalling. If you have multiple versions in this list, just select the Recommended version (indicated with a star).

After that, you'll be prompted if you want to send anonymous usage statistics. Uncheck the box if you don't want to send data. Finally, hit Finish.

While we finished the installation wizard, we'll still need to log in to our Minecraft account.
To do that, go to the "Profiles" button at the top right, click "Manage Accounts" and click "Add". Enter your Mojang Account credentials, and hit "OK". And voilà, we're done and ready to go
If you want to, you can create a desktop shortcut for the program.

Main Screen

This is the main screen of the launcher. As you can see, I have many different instances with different versions and purposes. In the Vanilla category I keep several versions of Vanilla Minecraft so that I can easily choose which version I want to play. All the instances have their own worlds and resource packs, so you won't have a problem with version incompatibility.

In the Forge category I keep all instances with mods. These instances can all have different versions of Minecraft, Forge and LiteLoader installed, all with their own mods.

You can double-click any instance to launch it.

Creating an instance

To create an instance, click the button highlighted above, and you'll be greeted with this screen:

To make it easier to understand, I highlighted some options for you:

• Red: Change the icon that will appear on the main screen for this instance. You can choose from a few standard icons or import your own (like I did with my Empire Minecraft instance )
• Blue: The name of the instance. You can choose anything you want here!
• Green: The group/category I mentioned earlier. You can choose an existing category here or type in a new one.
• Orange: The instance's Minecraft Version. Select a version by clicking the "..." button.

It's also possible to import a modpack straight away, but I won't be covering that in this guide.

I created an instance called "Guide" in the "Forge" category with Minecraft 1.11.2 for the sake of this guide.
And now you can play Vanilla Minecraft by just double-clicking your newly created instance

Installing Forge & LiteLoader
Okay, so we created a Vanilla Minecraft instance nice and easy, but we want to go one step further. Now, I'm going to show you how to install Forge and LiteLoader into your instance.

On the main screen, select your instance and click the "Edit Instance" button on the right, as shown above. A new screen will open.

Once this screen is open, all you'll have to do is click the "Install Forge" (Red) button and select the latest version of Forge. Do the same for LiteLoader (Green), and you're done

Launch your instance to make sure Forge and LiteLoader are installed correctly.

Yup, it works

Installing Mods

Installing mods is just as easy as installing Forge and LiteLoader. First, you'll need to download a mod of your choice. In this guide, I'll be installing JourneyMap, a minimap mod for Forge (you can download it for yourself here).

Once you've downloaded a mod of your choice, click on the "Loader Mods" (Blue) button as shown in the image above.

Then, click the "Add" button, navigate to the folder where you've downloaded your mod, and open it. Now, your mod should be added to the list.

Launch your instance again to be sure your mod is working. Repeat this process for every mod you want to install. If your mod doesn't work, make sure it's compatible with your current version of Minecraft/Forge/LiteLoader.



EDIT: Installing OptiFine without Forge

Understandably, some of you just want to install OptiFine and preferably without installing Forge. This is also possible in MultiMC. To do that, download OptiFine first from their site. Open the downloaded .jar file like you normally would when you're installing it for the regular Minecraft Launcher.

However, instead of choosing "Install", you should choose "Extract". You'll get a prompt asking you where you want to put the extracted file. When you did that, click "Save".

Now, switch back to MultiMC and open the Edit Instance menu of the instance where you want to install OptiFine in. Click "Add jar mod" and select the file you just extracted using the OptiFine installer. You'll get a warning that "you shouldn't be doing this unless you know what you're doing blah blah", but you can just ignore that


And that's it! If you want to install shaders to OptiFine in MultiMC, navigate to the folder where you've installed MultiMC and navigate to:

Code:

instances\<instance name>\minecraft\shaderpacks

and paste your shader pack there.

Resource Packs, Worlds and Other Options

Adding resource packs and worlds works in a similar way as installing mods. In the Instance settings menu, click "Resource packs" or "Worlds", click add and open your resource pack or world file.

If you take screenshots in-game, you can find them in the "Screenshots" option. You can view them or quickly upload them to imgur.com so you can share them with others easily.

Running Multiple Instances at The Same Time

If you have multiple accounts and a beefy computer, you might want to run multiple instances of Minecraft at the same time. This has been made easier in MultiMC in a recent update, because you don't have to open MultiMC twice anymore. On the main screen you can easily switch between accounts in the top right corner. If you have yet to add a second account, you can do so by clicking "Manage Accounts" and adding an account the same way as you did during the First Time Setup. You can than open one instance for each account you have. You cannot open the same instance twice though.

Conclusion

I think MultiMC is a great alternative for the default Minecraft Launcher. It helps you to keep your mods, world and resource packs separated, install mods easily and run multiple instances at the same time. If you hate the new Minecraft Launcher, you should definitely give this a try .

This is the first guide I wrote for EMC, I'd be happy to hear some feedback from you guys. By Feedback, I mean something I can improve my guides with, so "It's bad!" doesn't count as feedback.

Very nice guide, my compliments Tim!

Not only is this one heck of a guide, it also made me seriously curious about this. In fact, I'm most likely going to check this out and experiment a bit.

Fun fact: I don't hate the new launcher, not at all, but I have discovered a few quirks with it already. For some reason it sometimes simply crashes on me whenever I tried to fire up a second Minecraft instance. Even with using separate game directories. I think I pinpointed it to launcher_profiles.json (edit: and removed jar files in the versions directory) but yeah...

For the record: this is not evidence that the new launcher sucks or whatever. I've experienced the same problems with the old one. That launcher could sometimes simply fail to start Minecraft at all and close itself without giving any reason what so ever. I managed to trace that back to the 'versions' folder: if you installed a lot of Forge versions (for example) and then decide that it's time to clean up and remove several (unused!) instances then the old launcher would sometimes get haywired and refuse to launch any Minecraft version at all.

So some of these problems are definitely not limited to the new launcher.

But yeah, picture me curious. I'm especially interested in the ability to separate your mods a bit.

Heck, I'm going to experiment and report back later

This is a really helpful and clear guide! Thanks for the help

Thanks. Tried it out and looks a ton more complicated then it is. Most importantly I was able to get back the one thing I use the most.. Macro Mod for summoning/stableing my horse with 1 button

Bump

Added the section "Installing OptiFine without Forge".

The Gecko Society approved of this thread

Can you read minds or something?

I was about to comment how I gave up on all launchers and right now I moved back to the old one (1.76.6) because I ended up getting fed up with all of 'm

The new launcher

The new Minecraft launcher isn't bad at all, but it most definitely has some very nasty quirks. If you want to use multiple accounts then this launcher isn't suitable. Simple as that. Sometimes it will work, but it more than often chokes on itself. I've narrowed the possible causes down to the versions folder (specifically: the <version>.json file) as well as the launcher_profiles.json file.

But just to be clear: not even setting up a separate Minecraft gamefolder helps here. I've tried to fire up Minecraft many times (just the vanilla current version) only to be greeted with this:

I also noticed a very troublesome issue with the new launcher (which also made me decide not to use it): when using multiple accounts it will sometimes remove game jar files for reasons I fail to understand. So, there is chance that you'll look into .minecraft\versions\1.11.2\ and you'll find 1.11.2.json but not 1.11.2.jar. Not a problem for vanilla versions, but it gets tedious when you're trying to use OptiFine and discover 1.11.2-OptiFine_HD_U_B7.jar to be missing.

When I started a game and try to launch a new instance for GripCEO I'm always greeted with this error, no matter what I do. So yeah, this is not for me

MultiMC

I like what the authors are trying here, and it works. But I still ended up getting annoyed because every new version will be assigned to a separate gaming directory. So when I change the sound volume in one instance then this doesn't propagate to my other instances. Same goes for server settings, every instance I make (I usually keep 3: vanilla, vanilla + optifine & forgelite) has to be told about all the servers again. I know I can copy servers.dat, that's not the point.

Basically I can't easily combine anything. I want a few versions / instances to use the same gaming directory. I know it's not recommended, but I don't care because it works. Has always worked for me (apart from some minor logfile issues).

The old launcher

I spend way too much time on this nonsense; trying to debug the new launcher (finding out what made it crash) and ended up actually trying to make it work (see above error ). Then I ended up with MultiMC which also gobbled up time and right now I'm like "screw it".

So I grabbed a backup, restored launcher.jar, put it in a different directory (d:\program files\minecraft instead of d:\program files\minecraft\game) and made a shortcut onto my desktop. As a direct result I can finally log onto my LAN server using 2 accounts again. I did need to re-auth all my accounts but that was it

I'll probably write up a batchfile next week which can move launcher_profiles.json out of the way so that I can use both vanilla launchers side by side. Or maybe I'll study the changes and try to find a way to manually hack into it so that I can convert between both versions of the file back and forth.

But now... Finally... Time to play a game or two.

I hope they add something like a "shared directory" in a future update

Thank you nltimv for sharing this!
Gave it a try and everything went smooth with installing and adding all the mods I normally do use.
It is a little bit of a hassle to configure all the settings over again, as well as to copy waypoints from the regular .minecraft directory, in case if you do use minimap and had them saved previously, but in all honesty, that was just a small inconvenience compared to gains by MultiMC launcher, at least in my opinion.

Bump

Tried it for a few days now and although no issues with crashing, I dislike how each instance makes it's own folder and you need a separate instance for each account. So this means mods, schematic files, etc would all need to be duplicated to each folder since I don't use just 1 account for stuff like that.