As of 2023-12-08, I've downloaded...
A: Same as many people, I'm not really satisfied by Microsoft's recent actions. That includes censorship, violation of privacy, total incompetence, and much more.
Since harassing the devs on Twitter won't overturn this corporate decision, how about keeping the files forever for yourself? This way their obnoxious changes will not make their way into your minecraft experience. Sounds great to me.
A: I wrote a "tiny" and totally not over-engineered program in Go.
It runs in a docker container with --restart=always.
A: Right now, the whole folder only uses 34.41 GiB of hard drive space. No matter what storage medium you choose, the storage cost shouldn't be that high.
Downloading the files will take you 1-2 hours with a good connection. You can always do it over time.
A: Sadly, no. I would love to open source the repository, if Mojang/Microsoft didn't have this in the EULA:
The one major rule is that you must not distribute anything we've made unless we specifically agree to it. By "distribute anything we've made" what we mean is:
- give copies of our Game to anyone else;
- make commercial use of anything we've made;
- try to make money from anything we've made; or
- let other people get access to anything we've made in a way that is unfair or unreasonable;
Legally speaking, I cannot share any of the game files, or the program that's downloading them to my computer. Even though the service doesn't do anything to stop you from doing that.
That being said, the API is public knowledge, and well documented, so no one can stop you from writing a simple script to scrape everything.(That is, if you have a valid Minecraft licence)
I would love to help if you encounter any problems, please message me at mcdl@<root_domain>.xyz, or visit my homepage.
A: Spread the message. There are people out there doing the same thing, and more are sure to join. The more distributed copies we have, the chance of them being preserved over the years will be higher.