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Launcher Version: 2.0.808-stage

I'm excited about the new Minecraft Launcher, and I'm hoping to put it to good use.

My goal is simple: run Minecraft from a USB without degrading it with excessive read/writes.

The Gameband does this automagically, but I'm dirt poor, so I made my own using the old Minecraft Launcher.exe.

My original setup was to set the appdata folder to a place on my USB so I didn't have to move all of Minecraft's resources and libraries (see this), but all of my profiles targeted C:\Temp\PMC so that the saves, logs, etc that were constantly being written to were put on a hard drive to preserve the USB.

With the new launcher, it ignores the set appdata command, so I'm using the --workDir parameter instead. Then minecraft crashes before I even see the window open (the game, not the launcher). I saw this and it mentioned the --lockDir argument, so I'm trying to use that.

So far I've been able to make either everything run on the USB (not good for lifespan), or the C:\ drive (not good for copy time, because it's over 100MB on USB 2.0). I'm theorizing that I can use the mklink command to point the save folder on my USB to the real folder copied onto the C:\ drive, but I'm not sure. Another idea I had involves tweaking a PortableApps Minecraft.

My current code is this:

start "" "%CD%\bin\Minecraft.exe" --workDir "C:\Temp\PMC" --lockDir "%CD%\data\.minecraft"

That puts everything into the C:\ drive.

Any ideas and/or feedback are appreciated. Kind and constructive criticism especially.

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  • But why do you tag this with "DOS"?
    – Orc JMR
    Feb 11 '17 at 9:01
  • I'm using a Batch file to make the Launcher do stuff. Are DOS and batch files different?
    – Caleb
    Feb 11 '17 at 9:07
  • Well, as it says in tag description, DOS is a family of operating systems, none of which have much in common with modern Windows. True, batch files first appeared in MS-DOS, but no, these are not the same.
    – Orc JMR
    Feb 11 '17 at 9:18
  • 'Kay, I'll take it off. I should stop making these at 1:00 in the morning. That might help too.
    – Caleb
    Feb 11 '17 at 9:19
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Sometimes it feels humiliating answering your own question, but today, I feel quite proud of my work.

|This| is PMC, short for PortableMinecraft. It's a super janky PortableApp I threw together that is configured to work with Minecraft. It downloads the Minecraft Launcher so you don't have to, and it will take care of the rest. It moves files onto the C drive temporarily in order to preserve your precious USB's memory.

PLEASE read the Readme, because it has important information about how the thing works and what little issues it has.

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