Current state of Minecraft 1.16 servers?
01. 29. 2023
Good news for Minecraft players, maybe not so good news for Minecraft servers. It seems like some of Minecraft servers are actually catching up and updating to Minecraft 1.16. I'm sure most of Minecraft players will be happy about that but it does come with a cost for Minecraft server owners.
Minecraft 1.13 introduced massive changes to Minecraft server internals as result Minecraft servers or at least most of them stayed on Minecraft 1.18, mainly because it was hard and time consuming to update all plugins past Minecraft 1.12.
Seeing Minecraft servers running 1.16 makes me think, some of public plugins are already updated but servers that using more or less custom plugins will probably have hard time updating them. The main issue is of course the fact that Minecraft servers and plugins can't use IDs anymore, so plugins have to completely rewritten or at least huge chunks of code.
This would get even worse if Minecraft plugins wanted to support multiple versions of Minecraft server software, the big gap is between Minecraft 1.12 and Minecraft 1.13.
Can it be done?
Of course! One great example would be Essentials plugin that currently supports whole range of versions and does in fact run on Minecraft servers 1.8, Minecraft servers 1.16 and everything in between. But some developers took different route, such as dropping all support for versions prior to Minecraft 1.13 or even supporting on latest version.
If you're running Minecraft server I guess that's something to consider.