How safe is it to play on snapshots?

Question

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.

Answer 1

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...