Minecraft Java Vs Bedrock Edition – Analysis

There is a long-standing divide within the minecraft community and that is regarding the debate of which is better java or bedrock edition it’s a very contentious topic that draws several similarities from heated online debates like the well-known console wars and with many opinions floating around

It’s best to take a step back and take an unbiased and analytical approach to the bedrock versus java debate so in this video i will be comparatively breaking down each version to prove once and for all which is better and let me just say according to recent statistics

Over 7 billion people of the world’s population are not subscribed so click that button with the bell and maybe we can hit 1 billion subscribers by 2022 before we head into this analysis i’m going to show you a table of contents on the screen right now

So you are absolutely aware of what i’ll be discussing throughout the video i won’t be adding timestamps as i highly suggest you watch the video in its entirety so that you are not short of any context relating to this analysis now the most notable performance test we

Can do for each edition is comparing the render distance however other aspects like chunk loading lighting mob spawns and world loading could also be applied here with the playstation 4 bedrock was able to play smoothly with a 22 chunk render distance which is the maximum for playstation 4

Whereas on the pc java was able to play at a stable 60 frames per second using a 15 chunk render distance the fact that my playstation 4 was able to outperform my pc in rendering chunks is not so surprising if you break down why this is the case

You see the two versions run on engines that are vastly different due to the choice in programming language bedrock edition was built on c plus coding whereas java edition was built on java i’m not here to make the common misconception that java is inferior to c

Plus as many players take to that idea that programming languages can be better than one another or that one language is harder to code with compared to the other realistically c plus plus and java are both adequate to achieve the performance that bedrock engine has albeit there are some very minor

Advantages c plus has regarding memory management and cpu usage a potential theory to explain the performance difference is that the java developer team did not adhere to best practice or lack the resources when initially coding minecraft this is highly likely when we consider minecraft’s development history the sole developer of minecraft notch

Had created most of the game’s framework up until 2010 later being assisted by a handful of full-time developers after mojang grew from a large volume of minecraft sales mojang even after the introduction of a collaborative developer team still paled in comparison to the experience and resources of a

Aaa studio in comparison bedrock edition was built with the help of microsoft studios which made mojang their subsidiary in 2014. microsoft transformed mojang into a multi-studio company a far cry from the humble beginnings of mojang when there was only one developer however the consensus i’ve found online is that computationally the far render

Distances achieved in bedrock edition are mostly visual chunks and not actively ticking chunks what this means is that the area in which entity and chunk updates occur is smaller in bedrock compared to java let’s give us a little bit of an example to understand this so let’s say you had

A farm of potatoes in your world when you walk far enough away from your farm the potatoes will stop growing as you’re not in range to load in the chunks this range is smaller for bedrock addition to minimize the amount of ongoing tasks that the engine needs to process essentially bedrock edition has

Exchanged very technical gameplay features for performance on a variety of platforms which makes sense due to bedrock being aimed at the more casual player now the java community does have access to mods and framework that many players use to boost performance across many aspects of the game such as optifine and lithium but

Some bedrock players might argue that the necessity of external mods to improve performance is a downside if anything now i mentioned before that both c plus and java are both adequate programming languages for coding minecraft so i want to clear up why people might be confused as to why bedrock uses c

Plus instead of just sticking with java both languages do have competent cross-platform capabilities however the developers needed minecraft pocket edition to be compatible with ios pocket edition was then ported to consoles and created the bedrock edition we know today i know it’s not really relevant but i feel like it’s interesting to just

Mention the fact that bedrock edition is basically just a port of the mobile version of the game now as mentioned in the previous section bedrock did make major cuts in order to optimize performance so what i’ve actually done for the past few weeks is play a lot of bedrock

Addition to see what bugs or glitches i come across and basically see if the bugs impede on the enjoyment of the game i’ll quickly showcase some of the weirder glitches i ended up finding during my playthrough now they are mostly glitches that had no effect on the overall experience such as

Entities being frozen in place or my bed resetting my spawn constantly there were also game crashes that happened during the longer play sessions but they only happened twice in the two or so weeks that i was playing bedrock and it never resulted in progress being lost because of the background auto save feature

I also found some interesting exploits that benefited the player such as using an infinite xp glitch with auto furnaces it’s similar to how xp furnace farms work in java but the bedrock version was unbelievably overpowered i guess this balances out because most of the early game mob farms are terrible

For xp and bedrock due to the limitations of entity spawning not to mention if you want to mend your tools you can’t have them in your offhand to collect the xp while you’re grinding mobs in bedrock addition you are limited to only having shields torches and totems

Of undying in your offhand which is an extreme downside for the viability of most xp farms the only xp farm that works for mending tools is unfortunately the furnace glitch with the right setup you could very easily get thousands of levels while not actually exploring all the game has to offer

I haven’t even gotten to the end yet but i already had fully enchanted nevrite armor so clearly bedrock needs a rework of certain gameplay mechanics to fix the pacing issues and technical glitches and then maybe it will become closer to the stability of java edition let’s quickly take this discussion to

Something that mirrors this gameplay issue and that is afk fishing farms many players have wondered this in the game as it does improve the quality of life in survival however mojang have explicitly told players that this mechanic was unintentional for both bedrock and java as it made the game too easy and very

Honed in on one feature when the developers wanted the players to explore the game in its entirety since mojang are clearly on top of a lot of the gameplay issues that are plaguing the game i expect the various xp glitches like the furnace one to be sorted out in the

Future although this is very speculative all in all though bedrock was still playable and thoroughly enjoyable in fact i found it easier to get to the end game in bedrock however that was because of glitches so you can make of that what you will if we ignore the technical gameplay that

Many java players are drawn to bedrock boils down to just being minecraft i played bedrock extensively for this video specifically and i didn’t find anything that made me want to stop playing as i’ve mentioned previously bedrock was intended to appeal to casual players i have stumbled across discussion on the

Future of bedrock and that there are plans to carry over many java exclusive features until a disparity between both versions are little to none this includes hardcore and spectator mode which have been long awaited to be added to bedrock however there are some features which are too complex for the

Bedrock engine to implement such as entity cramming and custom terrain generation in the end it’s safe to assume that bedrock developers aimed to fulfill the needs of casual players first and foremost as they were their largest demographic and that the casual players equated to their largest source of revenue

Appealing to this crowd over technical players can be described as a move to build up capital and experience for the bedrock developers as we know that there are two separate teams working on the two separate versions we will talk more about this alongside sales and micro transactions later in

The video because there is still one more feature tied with gameplay that honestly deserves its own part of the video so let’s get into it right now Redstone is a popular talking point when arguing against bedrock edition and for good reason after scrubbing through tons of forum posts i’ve found some reddit users who’ve taken the time to collate features that make many redstone builds unviable in bedrock reddit user gmo heaven points out that there are some significant

Elements of redstone in java that are absent from bedrock such as the lack of quasi connectivity which is basically being able to power a block through the space above it even if that space is air as you can see it works in java edition but not in bedrock which means that the compact

Redstone builds that use this feature simply won’t work in java just to add quasi connectivity is not a redstone bug and it’s actually recognized as a legitimate feature by java developers now if we continue on other features that don’t appear in bedrock include one ticking i.e making a sticky piston spit out

Blocks really quickly and block update detection pistons are also noticeably slower which ruins the timings for many java redstone builds and if that wasn’t enough the way that redstone interacts with blocks in bedrock is for the lack of better words random i don’t really have any way to explain

Why it’s random i’m not an expert and by the looks of the community there aren’t many bedrock experts at all to quote gmo heaven bedrock redstone while in most ways less nuanced is still in its early stages it would be harsh to compare the two with equal weighting as java players

Have had more time to grow accustomed to the specific mechanics and their community is simply more passionate about redstone a lot of the things we know now about redstone have grown from groups like scicraft and prototech who have been innovating for years trying to stretch the limits of

The technical playstyle you just don’t have that level of dedication for bedrock but in time there may be players who take on that mantle or maybe some players already have and i’m just not aware of them as i mostly play java edition there is also a more active casual community surrounding java redstone

Thanks to youtubers like mumbo jumbo redstone has become popularized hence fostering a new generation of players who want to learn how to create with redstone all of this continually pushing this hobby forward now quickly we should also give some notice on command block programming as it’s closely related to

Redstone in some aspects so i wanted to recognize it here essentially bedrock edition has far less versatility in the pseudo-programming language that it uses to execute commands which is why many players opt for java edition when they want to make command block creations that’s as far as i’m willing to explore

With that topic because honestly my knowledge for command blocks is limited to changing the weather and the time of day so we’re gonna just leave it at that let’s talk about multiplayer for both platforms there are some vast differences between bedrock and java in this aspect on one side there is really

Well optimized cross-play capabilities and an overall easier way to play with friends only while on the other side there is wider support for servers and therefore more to choose from the only fault i can really find with bedrock is that there is less variety of servers compared to java but then again

When you look at the needs of the casual player the servers available are already adequate however i do have a gripe with bedrock on the playstation 4 specifically because it took the developers over a year to implement realms and servers and crossplay wasn’t exactly optimized on launch

Before realms you could still play with friends but it required having the host to keep the world loaded in if the host had to leave other players would not be able to keep playing now on the flip side it’s very difficult for casual players to establish multiplayer servers on java

As requires a little bit of know-how to ensure that the server is well optimized however using server apis such as spigot or paper allow support for a variety of plugins and with forge you can play modded survival with friends which is unheard of on bedrock just quickly i should mention that java

Has a more active modding community compared to bedrock which in turn means more mods to explore with some being made exclusively for multiplayer it’s just something interesting to note when comparing the two versions now back to multiplayer comparisons you can actually play realms on java which were actually simpler to set up compared

To bedrock realms realms do incur a monthly fee however which some people are opposed to purely because running self-made servers can be more optimized and cheaper in the long run if kept at a small scale obviously large servers are very expensive to operate but they are also commercially viable with donations and

Pay to win models all in all what platform you choose for playing multiplayer minecraft is largely dependent on preference do you prefer more servers to play on do you prefer setting up multiplayer worlds with or without necessary technical expertise are you willing to foot the bill for minecraft realms or server hosting

That’s what it boils down to if you’re on the fence about choosing one addition over the other For the last topic of discussion i want to take some time to compare the two developer teams as many players are drawn to games that are consistently up to date and have active developers that avidly respond to bug or glitch reports on minecraft java the support is very

Strong with new additions and updates being trialled first on java before being worked on by the bedrock team this often creates a lag behind with bedrock support as many players have noticed in previous updates with snapshots java players are also able to have earlier access to content whereas bedrock players typically have

To wait until final release i’m aware of there being experimental gameplay as an option for bedrock but when i’ve tried it out in the past waiting for the never update release it didn’t feel as fleshed out as the never update snapshots were but that is just my anecdote so take that for what

You will looking over to minecraft bedrock developer support is relatively the same however the first thing players would want to call out is the bugs it’s a fair call as the bedrock port was riddled with bugs upon release however i’d argue that the bedrock developers edge out the java ones on bug fixes

Purely because of how dedicated they are to have continually updated their game looking at their development history bedrock has clearly been working very hard at all the present faults in the game sure new ones crop up from time to time especially after big releases but you can’t deny that bedrock developers are

Working hard to flesh out a game on an engine that has been around for less time than its java predecessor i’d also argue that bedrock has more support and resources compared to java because bedrock is where a majority of mojang’s revenue and sales is generated bedrock edition is what propelled

Minecraft into becoming the top selling game of all time and sure there will be the select players who are avidly against the mass consumerist model that microsoft and mojang have taken to but without this model without microtransactions and realms minecraft would not have been able to make increasingly ambitious updates for both

Java and bedrock it’s the capital that minecraft bedrock generates that keeps the game alive and consistently updated it’s why bedrock was the first to receive native ray tracing support because it makes sense to put in the cost of implementing new graphics technology on the version of minecraft that is funding those costs

This does not mean java will be abandoned of course as it still makes money from realms and it retains a large nostalgic playerbase that help generate pr for minecraft i mean look at the top minecraft youtubers on the platform right now they all play minecraft java keeping

Java alive allows mojang to gain from free publicity i’ll bet my bottom dollar that a lot of people have gotten back into or just started playing minecraft because of youtubers like dream bringing the game to new audiences this is why java will continue to be supported despite the commercial viability of bedrock edition

Now to conclude we need to answer the question we went in with what is the better version of minecraft now to be brutally honest there is no better version as we have boiled down each aspect of each edition and we could quantify my analysis into ratings out of

10 and try to tally up my score but it would end up being too subjective and biased there is genuine merit to both versions and ideally people should let them co-exist but obviously there are players who want to gate keep their favorite version of minecraft and get

Really toxic at the other players for playing the quote-unquote inferior version so what do i say for those people well if your hardware is not the most powerful or you play exclusively on consoles i obviously recommend you get bedrock edition if your interest in minecraft resides in nostalgia or you have a

Fondness for technical play styles i recommend you get java edition if you have windows 10 well that’s really a judgment call on whether you want bedrock or java edition because you can play both on that all in all i’m not here to change mines i really made this video because i was

Passionate about the fundamental parts of minecraft and i hope people were able to take something away with them after watching this maybe i enlighten you on things you didn’t know about minecraft because i certainly learned a lot while making this analysis either way thank you so much for

Watching this video make sure to like comment and subscribe because i plan to make even more insightful commentaries about minecraft in the future now i’ll see you all in the next video bye bye you