If you are playing Minecraft on PC using the Xbox app, be careful before you update the popular open-world survival game. Developer Mojang says you might end up destroying your saved worlds—unless you do some digital repairing.
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On March 15, at around 2:30 am EST, Mojang’s official support account on Twitter warned all PC players using the Xbox app not to update Minecraft through the app. “If you do so, your worlds may be lost,” said Mojang, like some sinister and overly dramatic comic book villain.
So what should Minecraft players on PC who use the Xbox app do instead? Well, you’ll need to download a separate tool—the Gaming Services Repair Tool—and then run that piece of software first before installing any updates for Minecraft.
“Using this tool updates the Gaming Services to version 19.87.13001.0, which will avoid the update error,” says Microsoft on its official support page. There, players can find instructions for how to download and run the tool. It seems like a lot to ask people to do just to play a game via your launcher. But the alternative is all your worlds possibly being destroyed.
Kotaku has reached out to Xbox and Mojang for more information.
Minecraft players report years-old saves have been deleted
At least a few replies to Microsoft’s tweet suggest some folks have lost years of saved worlds after updating Minecraft. “2.5 years of stuff, including a ton of javascript projects from the last year,” said one person. “Same here, updated on Tuesday everything gone,” replied someone else. Over on the Mojang bugs tracker, other players have reported losing all their worlds. It seems the bug has been affecting some folks for at least two days now.
Weirdly, as far as I can tell, Microsoft hasn’t posted about this problem in other areas of the internet. The main Minecraft Twitter account, with over 7 million followers, hasn’t shared the support tweet or mentioned that folks might want to use this tool to protect their worlds from being Thanos-snapped away via an update on PC. Instead, as of this writing, the latest tweet from that big account is just a Pi Day joke.
Hopefully whatever is causing this issue with the the Xbox PC app will be fixed soon and folks won’t be made to hop through some weird hoops to play a game they already own and have likely enjoyed for years.
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