Macenstein

For many of us, the 1.4.4 Minecraft update broke the ability to host and play games locally on our home network. When choosing to “Start a LAN World”, we would be told our game was being hosted on “0.0.0.0:59922” instead of “192.168.1.7:59922”, and those people attempting to join us received “Connection Refused” errors. Mojang has said a 1.4.5 fix will be released on Tuesday (pre-release available here), but I downloaded the pre-release of that and it did not solve the issue for me, and who the hell can wait for Tuesday anyway? It’s the weekend, for crying out loud, and I’ll be DAMNED if my kids and I are going to leave the house!

So, while I can’t guarantee this will work for you, it worked for me, so hopefully this fix will help.

Basically what we want to do is revert our Minecraft install to 1.4.3, which worked fine (Note: You can also follow these same steps with the 1.4.5 pre-release that Mojang claims should have fixed the problem). Now, Mojang doesn’t really seem to keep a long list of previous versions of Minecraft on their site, but if you Google “Minecraft 1.4.3” you will likely end up on this page, which had a link to the pre-release of Minecraft 1.4.3. So go ahead and click that, and then download the .JAR file.

Next, you simply need to replace your current “minecraft.jar” file with this one. Unfortunately with the latest OS X releases, Apple made this a little trickier, as this file resides in your USER> Library folder, which they hid (note, this is different than the Library folder you see on your main harddrive – this is the Library folder for the USER, which is your name). But it’s easy enough to find. What I like to do is click on your desktop, then at the top of the screen select GO. You will see a bunch of default locations you can jump to, like the Applications folder, Documents, etc, BUT, if you hold down the OPTION key, you will suddenly see “Library” listed as a choice. So go ahead and select that.

OK, so now in the Library folder, Look for APPLICATION SUPPORT and then minecraft. Inside the minecraft folder, you will see a folder called “bin”. Open that up, and you will see a file called “minecraft.jar”. This is the file we want to replace with our older 1.4.3 version we downloaded, which might still be in your DOWNLOADS folder unless you moved it already. If you’d like, you can either rename the current minecraft.jar file “minecraft_new.jar” or something, or drag it to your desktop for safe keeping if you ever want to revert to 1.4.4 for some reason.

So, replace the current minecraft.jar with our 1.4.3 pre-release .jar we downloaded. It will probably ask you if you are sure you want to replace this file with an older version. Just click “Hell yes”.

So that’s it. Try firing up Minecraft. (PLEASE NOTE: In order to work, ALL computers trying to join/host the game need to be on the same version of the game, or you will get an “outdated server” message.) For myself and the 3 systems here we are now able to play LAN games again. You’ll know if it worked if you see 1.4.3 listed as the version number when you launch Minecraft. If it didn’t work, feel free to try it again using the 1.4.5 “minecraft.jar” file on Mojang’s site here.

Good luck! And let me know if you have any success!