How safe is it to play on snapshots?
Based on experience and general stability, would you say it is safe to play your main world on a snapshot build of Minecraft?
I am aware there's no guarantee of world integrity (but then again, neither is there any on the stable builds), but the question remains.
- Have you encountered irrecoverable chunk errors?
- Is upgrading to a stable build easily feasible?
- Is upgrading to other snapshot builds easily feasible?
- [When] should I backup my worlds?
- Are there other concerns to be had?
The new features are promising, and I don't feel like waiting anymore.
41 Answer
It is quite safe to play on these snapshots, because even popular multiplayer servers often upgrade to them.
It is no problem at all to upgrade to those snapshots: just download the minecraft.jar file and replace it in .minecraft/bin.
It is often good to wait a day or two after the first snapshot of a week (**w**a) has been released because they are often buggy and another snapshot (**w**b) can be released shortly afterwards.
I recommend to do backups regularly, maybe even as often as every 2 hours of playing, just to be safe. Making backups is easy: exit from world, compress the world folder to an archive and resume your game.
However, there are indeed some concerns:
You can't go back to a previous build (without losing progress). New items will disappear in best case, or even cause worse problems.
New additions can be unbalanced/overpowered. For example, Hoppers used to be crafted with Stone blocks, which are very cheap, but then were changed to use Iron. So you may feel uncomfortable about this...
