Minecraft Wiki:Issues

This page's purpose is to list all the bugs players have come across. Most of the single-player bugs also apply to multi-player.

Bugs and feature requests can now be logged at Getsatisfaction: Mojang.

Survival Single Player (SSP)

General

The game will sometimes produce a .txt file containing an error message onto the desktop whenever the game is closed down. A similar error message is also produced when the game actually does crash.
If you have your Minecraft window open on full when you sign in the Mojang image will be out of place.
Occasionally, a given area of blocks can revert to their original state, partially or completely undoing any construction or mining that had been done in that area. This usually happens after a long excursion into a natural cave system.
Sometimes a specific chunk will constantly revert. Water will not duplicate in these chunks if it is flowing, and water tends to linger much like lava when the source is removed.
You are unable to directly swap items in your inventory when the two items are same. This is important if you would like to swap the same item type with different durabilities.
Sometimes you can see through everything; this randomly happens on all games on all platforms. Toggling the fog distance will change everything back to normal (Default key is F).
Iron ingots and saplings may not appear in the inventory when collected.
If you die while viewing your inventory, your character will fall out of the box and will be rotated sideways.
If you wait a lot of time after map chunks are generated and then continue forward causing the game to generate new map chunks, the game will generate weird structures which do not connect properly with the map. Sometimes even creating mountains which are, in a sense, cut in half. Furthermore, if one chunk ends in an ocean, and the other starts off with land with an underground cave in it, the water will not enter the cave.
When sand or gravel is generated above a cave (or any opening), it will float until a space by it is modified in any way. Partially fixed in 1.3 since sand is generated on top of sandstone now.
Sneaking does not prevent the player from falling off of Stone Slabs and Soul Sand. Soul Sand only prevents falling off when sneaking if the ledge height is more than 1.
Sneaking prevents movement onto Soul Sand from any other block.
Holding the Sneaking button then pressing the key to pull up the menu and quitting will result in being one block lower when the save is opened again.
Since the November 10th update, there have been several performance issues in SSP. Save/load times have increased, sudden random FPS drops, and random crashing/freezing.
If you enter the inventory and look at the sunset while still in the inventory, The sunset will become a dark brown.
Occasionally, when saving the game and reloading, you will fall through the block you were standing on.
A bug exists where the game may refuse to remember custom controls after updating (not to a specific version - just updating in general). This is caused by one of the values in Minecraft's "options.txt" file being unset, usually the "lastServer" field - attempting to connect to any multi-player server address (valid or otherwise) typically resolves the problem.
Occasionally, some chunks of the map do not update with the day/night cycle, as seen here. This bug seems more common with chunks containing snow biomes. Also, even in caves or closed environments player can see sometimes lighting bugs, like some spot has full light and it has a small spot of full darkness next to it. When the spot is edited, it changes to normal.
If you enter Fullscreen mode, then exit it, mouse clicks will no longer work for game dialogs (game menu, inventory etc.). However, mining and using items still work. Pressing Esc, waiting for the game to save and restarting the client resolves this problem. Here is a topic on Minecraft Forums related to this bug.
If you place four blocks so that they can stop the flow of water then place water or lava into it you can put a cactus piece into it.
If you open your inventory and hit a movement key at the same time that movement key will become "stuck". Pressing and releasing the same movement key again will stop you again.

Arrows

Arrows that hit doors can float if the door changes its state.
They also appear to collide with fences, portals, and sugar cane.
Arrows that have not hit a mob become unobtainable if you die or save and quit then begin playing before retrieving them.

Beds

Sneaking does not prevent you from falling off beds.
Particles (torches, furnaces, etc.) do not "adjust" to face you, some of them may look flat or even be invisible while sleeping.
If you sneak while sleeping, you can see your face or arms.
If placing a bed on an outside facing one block thick wall, Mobs can sometimes spawn on or near the bed with you sleeping in it. This causes you to wake up during the night in danger of being killed by a hostile mob.
If you try to activate a bed you are standing on it will not work giving the error message "You can only sleep at night".
If you try to activate a bed when you are too far away it will not work giving the error message "You can only sleep at night".
Beds placed in fully enclosed (on both sides and with only one space above) areas can cause you to wake up inside a wall, killing you and potentially destroying your items

Boats

When entering a boat on ground it will show a splash effect similar to that of water.
If you manage to stand on your boat while it is under water, the boat will be unable to move.
If you go under a water stream your boat will accelerate and rise upwards.
If you save and reload while in a boat, you will no longer be in the boat.
Pressing F5 whilst in a boat will show your leg/foot armor protruding from the bottom of the boat, even though your character is sitting.

Cactus

Cactus also has a South/West rule for applying damage. Placing a block above a single cactus piece prevents you from stepping on the cactus and prevents you from taking damage by pushing against the south or west sides of the cactus. The north and east sides of the cactus can still hurt you.
If there is snow, fire, water, or lava on a block, then a cactus can be placed on top of that block violating the usual rules for placing cactus. When the cactus grows it will recognize that is is improperly planted and uproot itself leaving two loose cactus blocks.

Chests

If you open a chest and press the jump key, sneak key or a movement key, your character will act as though that key is still being held even after exiting the chest's interface. This can be fixed by pressing the same key after leaving the chest menu.
A chest may always be placed on top of a block that has snow, fire, water, or lava on it allowing you to create triple (or larger) chests. Naturally the interface for these over-sized chests is buggy.

Dispensers

Unlike chests, when a dispenser is destroyed, the items inside are gone forever. Notch has stated that this is a bug: [1].

Doors

If you place a door next to a Cactus it will clone the door giving you two doors (unlimited doors) shown Here.
If doors are placed next to two stapled cactus-blocks, the door will immediately get destroyed and will drop two doors instead of one. One door can not be collected. If a door is placed next to two stapled and newly planted(small) cacti, an uncollectable door will be dropped, and a door window frame will remain, which drops nothing.

Fences

Fences' undersides are black.
Occasionally placed fences will become invisible [2]. They will become visible again if you place normal blocks near them though

Fire

Fire has a South/West rule for applying damage. Placing a block directly above a fire prevents you from stepping into the fire and also makes it impossible to damage yourself by pressing against the block from the south or west sides. The north and east sides of the fire can still hurt you.

Furnaces

When destroying a Furnace, unlike Chests, anything inside the Furnace will be permanently destroyed.
If you access a furnace and press the jump key, sneak key or a movement key, your character will act as though that key is still being held even after exiting the furnace's interface. This can be fixed by pressing the same key after leaving the furnace's interface.

Gravel or Sand

Gravel or sand will not fall down if a torch is placed between the time a block underneath is destroyed and before the sand/gravel begins to fall. Example
Gravel or sand will accumulate into resources if a torch is place between the time a block underneath is destroyed and during the time the sand/gravel is falling to fill in the spot. Example
Gravel or sand will not fall down if snow is underneath it.
If you break a block below gravel or sand and are walking into gravel or sand, you will literally walk into the gravel or sand.
Collapsing two blocks of sand or gravel on you and staying off so you are still inside the sand/gravel blocks but you don't get harmed. You can see through blocks that are connected to the sand/gravel blocks. This is an easy way to find caverns.
If you place a sand or gravel block then quit the game before it starts falling, upon reload, it will float. If a nearby block updates, it will fall.

Jukeboxes

Inserting a record and removing it before or after the song ends will cause the jukebox to eject a duplicate. Only one of the records will be retrievable, but the second will remain stuck in the world and eventually disappear after a certain amount of time. It is possible to abuse this bug to spawn hundreds of records.

Lava

When lava is touching the same corner as you it has a possibility of burning you. This will only happen when the lava is at the corner SOUTHWEST of you. (see South/West rule)

Example

   N
  =^= 
W +== E
  ++=
   S

= is a block + is lava ^ is you

Note: Items can burn when touching the corner.

Note: This can also happen with water, but water only collides with you.

Minecarts

When spawning mine carts on a small track, they will gain momentum from colliding with each other.
Having too many minecarts will cause the game to crash.
It is possible to gain neverending speed for a mine cart from abusing the bug by spawning many carts on a small track.
Riding in a minecart on above track may cause your player's image to disappear until you die or reopen Minecraft.
Riding a minecart at the top of the map makes the player invisible until you leave the cart or ride downwards.
Sometimes moving minecarts disappear completely.
If you drop a mine cart at the rail, will it still block moving mine carts at the track.
If you open your inventory while in a minecart, your player hand model will not function as expected.
Riding a minecart into a Nether portal causes you to become stuck.
Removing a minecart while riding in it will cause you to go through the ground, but only if the track is sitting on a non-solid-block and air is all around it. If there is an non-solid-block underneath the block the track is on, this will cause you to fall through.
If a minecart enters lava, the client will freeze. If the player is in the minecart when it enters lava, the client will crash.
If you make a cannon that can fire a lot of TNT and then place a single track facing away from the cannon on the "firing spot" (the place where you put the TNT missile), put a minecart on that track and detonate the TNT while in the minecart, you will fly up into the air (if you have god mode on) and when you come back, you will find more than one minecart item near the cannon. This has only been proved in version 1.2.2 and before.
Minecarts can go off tiny tracks if their momentum is too high.
Placing a minecart behind a wall of lava or water and right clicking the minecart behind the lava/water makes the player to enter the minecart without touching the lava/water. This trick can be used as a "teleport" or a secret entrance.

Mobs

If a mob is riding a mine cart and 2 or more mine carts get stuck in each other, after destroying or moving the carts away from the other carts the mobs will be invisible.
When up close to a Zombie Pigman, the inventory GUI will become much brighter.
If you are above a Ghast's height and are standing still, Ghasts will shoot fireballs over your head, without damaging you.
Ghasts will shoot at the camera in 3rd person view.
Fireballs launched by Ghasts fail to start fire.
Squids can spawn even in deep caverns with a small amount of water.
Mobs can move briefly before map data is loaded when signing out and loading the world, usually resulting in the mobs getting stuck.

Paintings

If a painting is placed and immediately removed, there is a chance that the picture frame will get duplicated.
If a block is removed from behind a painting, it will pop off the wall when a player touches it after a reload, even if it is a multi-block painting and there are other blocks still behind it.
If there is a torch next of place you are going to put a two-block or more wide painting, the painting will go through the torch.
Sometimes the picture on a painting will be purple squares as seen in the terrain.png.
Paintings can be placed in front of a door or open walkway to create a secret room (it lets you walk through the painting.)

Portals

Placing a boat in the portal and entering it will cause the game to skip the "safe area" finding algorithm. This means that you will appear in the Nether world exactly where you are meant to regardless of blocks in the way. Example video.
Being killed in the Nether will cause a portal to be generated near your relative location on Earth, as though you had teleported back from your "final resting place" normally.
Riding a minecart into a Nether portal causes you to become stuck.
Opening the inventory then crafting while in a portal will destroy the item you are crafting and make the loading screen text turn gray and double AND won't show the loading progress.

If snow, fire, water, or lava are over a block than a sapling may be placed on that block allowing it to be planted in a non-dirt tile. After a short time the sapling will recognize that it is illegally planted and uproot itself.

Sign

Placing a sign on top of a block at the top of the world destroys the sign.

Sugar Cane

If a block is covered in snow, fire, water, or lava, than sugar cane can be placed on that block violating the usual placement rules for sugar cane. When the sugar cane grows it will recognize that it is illegally planted and uproot itself leaving two loose sugar cane blocks.

Snow

Snow currently does not fall, meaning that once it's destroyed it will not come back.
- The snow falling animation is absent, but if you have chunks from a world that was originally a snow world (pre-biomes) than snow will still accumulate on those tiles even though there is no longer any snow fall animation.
Utilizing snow, one can place saplings and cacti on any block. However, the cacti will break when they first grow, and the sapling will deroot itself after a while.
Floating snow is occasionally found above lakes that formed on the surface of snowy biomes. (Update which caused this is currently unknown)

Stairs

Stairs let light pass through.
Sometimes, when placed over water, only the black wireframe cube that normally appears around a block will show, not the actual stairs.

Slabs

When firing arrows at the far away 1/4 (1/5?) of the slab, your arrows may pass through and hit the block behind it.

Water

It is possible for multiple water currents to crash against each other and create an inescapable rip-tide. Not only will this rip tide hold you in one place, it will also throw you from a boat if you are sailing it.
While underwater, there a glitch allowing you to breathe and see through water by placing blocks in proper ways. This video will show you how it's done
Like lava, when water is touching the same corner as you it has a possibility of colliding you.
Numerous strange objects will prevent the flow of water such as , signs, sugar cane, open doors, fences, half-blocks, etc.

Workbench

If you access a workbench and press the jump key, sneak key or a movement key, your character will act as though that key is still being held even after exiting the workbench's interface. This can be fixed by pressing the same key after leaving the workbench's interface.

Mac OSX

On some Mac OS X Systems, the World Select screen will not appear at all, making the game unplayable on those Mac systems, in other cases, the Mojang AB logo will appear green and the title screen and the game in dark areas will appear red.
In dark areas some sides of tile blocks will not render making a see through cave and grass in daylight will appear purple, water in darkness will also not render. This has only been proved with non-Intel chip Mac.

Survival Multiplayer (SMP)

General

When entering a server, the player will fall into an endless void. After a few minutes the player is disconnected.
If a player has respawned, he can place blocks on the block he is currently standing on. This will not decrease the block count in his inventory, effectively cloning blocks. This bug only occurs with non-opped players
Full server world saves do not reliably save the entire world. This can be proven on a single person private server with whitelisting enabled when attempting to do a full server save via:

Disabling incremental level saving with 'save-off' on on Minecraft console.
Forcing a full save to disk with 'save-all' on on Minecraft console.
Archiving and saving the archived world with 'tar -xvzf save.tg world' on shell in secondary system console.
Turning back on incremental level saving by doing a 'save-on' on Minecraft console.

Enormous, cuboid areas (usually one or two chunks) of unfinished map open in random places. Caves, minerals, water, magma and mobs are visible when a Player peers into one of these voids. These areas cannot be walked on, causing a "[user] moved wrongly!" message to appear in the Server, however, Players can ride minecarts through them with relative ease. If the void appears in the middle of water, Players can "float" over the void using a boat. These have become significantly less common since the 1.13 update.
When you sneak (in third person), your character's feet are "in" the ground.

Arrows

Arrows shot onto a wall cause the arrow to create a flickering wobbling repeat of the arrows movement. This happens mainly on glass.
Fired arrows will appear to come out backwards at first, then continue on a regular trajectory.
After firing an arrow, any other player will see a repeating rapid arrow fire at the state the arrow was fired. However, the arrows will not collide or damage anything. They will disappear upon reconnecting. Dispensers won't do this, though.

Boats

Boats greatly increase server lag.
If you ride a boat over a chunk of water which did not load properly ( ex. the water is really there, but you can't see it and can see through the whole world ), the boat disappears.
You can ride boats onto land but of course very slowly.
Boat controls are having delay when you control them, because of lag.
When a Boat gets damaged (by a player), it does not shake.

Chests

Destroying a chest will spill its contents and every item in the chest will be duplicated. Only half of the items visible to the player can be picked up, so no items are gained nor lost in the process.
- The disappearing seems to be caused by the same bug just in the opposite way. Instead of the server lagging behind the client and telling it that the item is still there the server will erroneously delete.

Dispensers

When a dispenser dispenses an item, there is no smoke puff and no sound is heard.

Doors

When attempting to stack doors, one will be deleted.
If you put two iron doors next to each other and add any mechanism to open both of them, the right one will be open all the time and close when you activate the mechanism.
- Not actually a bug. Two doors side by side open in opposite directions and require opposite redstone signals to function properly.
If you open and close a wooden door repetitively while jumping, you can catch yourself in the door and jump again. This can be used to reach 1 block higher places or to get on top of wooden doors overall.

Fishing

Sometimes when fishing you won't get a fish when you right click to catch the fish.

Furnaces

Furnaces rotate, when they are used. This seems to be influenced by what blocks are placed around them
Furnaces can stop smelting items during a severe lag.

Jukeboxes

The records duplicate if you eject the record before the song has finished. Only one record can be picked up however, the rest are phantoms

Ladders

In the beta 1.3 patch, Ladders tend to be invisible but still usable. (confirmed in multiplayer) !Patch not yet fixed February 26th, 2011!

Minecarts

Engines consume coal but do not move under their own power, making them useless.
Minecarts that pass over pressure plates will sometimes not activate a redstone current, even though a "click" noise is heard.
A player will pass through the minecart, but when the player is passing through it counts as "pushing" the minecart.
Empty/Storage Minecarts start to behave strangely when they are too far away from the Player. They disappear completely, disappear until Players disconnect and reconnect, or suddenly stop on tracks despite having sufficient momentum.

Mobs, Hostile

Shooting animations (Ghast fireballs/opening mouth and eyes, Skeleton arrows) are not always visible.
Ghasts' fireballs occasionally do not explode, only lighting a small area on fire.
Sometimes mobs freeze in animation and can not be hit. They disappear after about 2 minutes.
Some users are reporting mobs will be invisible, but can still attack you. On update 11/24/2010 SMP health update post Notch explained that to see invisible mobs, players must set their difficulty to the server side difficulty or higher.
Upon death, all monsters around you will be frozen when you come back. you cannot kill them, or attack them, and they cannot attack you. You can however push them, touch them, and they will still make noises. Skeletons, and Zombies will catch fire, and it will flicker and not cause damage.
During severe lag, you can be killed by mobs or players without ever seeing them.
Hitting a mob a few times in a row before the mob receives the damage will cause the mob to receive the damage from only one hit, but the force of all of them, making them fly up and backwards a considerable distance.
Every mob will freeze, when the server is timed out.
A dead mob has it's corpse staying on the ground and shaking.
When slimes divide in SMP they often create many fake duplicates which are invulnerable, and inflict no damage. Disconnecting/Reconnecting causes these fake slimes to disappear. This bug does not occur in Survival (SP) mode.
When slimes divide, they can create larger slimes.
Slimes can spawn even with hostile-spawn set to false.

Mobs, Passive

Squids can rise upwards the sky and disappear behind the clouds.
If a monster spawner is exposed to sunlight, the sprite shown inside the spawner block becomes a pig, and the spawner will spawn pigs on any nearby grass block. These pigs will behave as normal for a few minutes and later become immobile. These pigs cannot be harmed or moved or interacted with in any way. Saving and disconnecting, and logging back in will reset these pigs. Additionally, if torches are placed around the spawner, it will cease to spawn pigs.

Paintings

When copying an SSP world onto an SMP server, paintings are removed in the transition.

Saddles

Saddles will return to the player's inventory if the pig de-spawns.

Sand and Snow

Sand will not fall down if snow is underneath it.

Pumpkins

Pumpkins used as a helmet now display the carved face on the back instead of the front. Users wearing pumpkin helmets will still be able to see through the cut-outs but will appear in server to have a smooth pumpkin face and a Jack'o'Lantern grimace on the back of their head

TNT

TNT lit by one user cannot be seen by another.
Occasionally, a TNT block meant to drop will enter a repeating fall animation (but not actually fall) when lit. When the TNT finally explodes, it will explode at the position it was placed.
Occasionally, a TNT block can also explode twice, but this will not damage the environment twice.

Trees

Using bone meal to quick-grow trees will sometimes cause "floating" trees to grow with sapling still at the base. Removing the sapling or using more bone meal can cause the tree to grow into an enourmous bundle of leaves with no log base. These leaves will now respawn immediately after being harvested. The only way to remove these glitched leaf blocks is to burn each block individualy (fire wil not spread for some reason) OR build an umbrella above it, the shadow seems to instantly vanquish the leaves. - This glitch is vastly more common when quick-growing trees under another trees foliage
Planting a sapling and waiting a bit will sometimes yield tree trunks with weird distributions of leaves, and in some cases, no leaves at all. Trees can also grow but be invisible, making it impossible to traverse a tree farm after a while. Rejoining the server appears to make invisible trees visible again and fire will swiftly cause phantom foliage to be made manifest.
Leaves from trees will overwrite some blocks, such as a nearby fence.
Placing a torch on Leaves does not make the 'pop' sound for the item being placed.

Water

While underwater, there a glitch allowing you see through water by placing blocks in proper ways. This video will show you how it's done. It will appear as if you can breath under water and your breath meter will disappear, but you will still drown.
You may find yourself drowning despite having a full breath meter. This glitch is seemingly random and quite uncommon

Wheat Seeds

Occasionally, patches of planted seeds will revert to a regular dirt block without any physical contact. (Note: This can happen due to lack of water, or trampling, so may not be a bug)
Sometimes a tilled dirt block can remain tilled despite being trampled
Due to lag, when a Farmland gets trampled, the planted seed is still there. It will disappear after a few seconds.