If you run Minecraft Java servers in Docker you already know itzg/docker-minecraft-server. It is the default choice for vanilla, Paper, Fabric, Forge, and every nightmare modpack in between. Yesterday it received its monthly major bump to 2026.10.0.
The changes that actually matter
- Logging upgrades and three separate bug fixes for GTNH, the 400+ mod behemoth that regularly melts servers.
- Retrofit of mc-image-helper to extract archives more reliably.
- Official documentation now explains how to pin the most stable version of any Modrinth project instead of just latest.
- Dependency bumps, new contributor docs, and expanded Java 25 tags for the version scheme Mojang adopted this year.
None of this is headline-grabbing. It is the kind of quiet maintenance that stops your 1.8 TB GTNH instance from spamming logs until the disk dies or failing to pick a working Modrinth file and wasting hours. The stable-java21 and java25 tags rolled out within hours of the release.
To get it run docker pull itzg/minecraft-server:2026.10.0 or simply pull latest or stable if that is how your compose file is written. The project has 2.2k stars on GitHub and 436 million downloads on Docker Hub for a reason. It just got better at the one thing the biggest modpacks demand: not exploding.
Other
