The launcher installs and updates the game — no need to grab these archives by hand. You need your own Minecraft: Java Edition.
Horizon's own menus, Simple and Advanced graphics settings, much faster rendering, and fixes for Linux sound, Windows, villages and preparing resources.
New
- Horizon's own menus: a new title screen, world list, options and pause menu in the launcher's style, over a live frozen landscape. The vanilla look is still available: Options → Interface → Menu style → Classic.
- Graphics settings, Simple and Advanced: presets (Performance, Balanced, Quality, Ultra), or every rendering, quality, display and performance setting, each with a short description and its cost, plus a performance overlay.
- Much faster rendering: for example, at render distance 8 over a village, 363 → 2,409 FPS on an RTX 4080. Render distance 32 still stutters in places.
Fixed
- No sound on Linux.
- Linux builds now run on ordinary distros (Arch, Ubuntu, …), not just the machine they were built on.
- Windows asked for a missing DLL: the launcher no longer needs the Visual C++ runtime.
- Memory growing near villages: mobs were duplicated when chunks reloaded.
- The frame rate dropping and staying low in villages.
- Preparing resources failed on Linux with "Missing … java-objc-bridge" (#41). Mojang's republished 26.3 version file is accepted too.
- The hand and held item looked wrong at high FOV.
- Missing swing animations in Creative and Survival.
Known
- Sprint-jumping has been reported as broken, but we couldn't reproduce it. If it happens to you, describe it in #horizon-bugs on Discord.
- Online-mode servers aren't supported; skins served over https show the default skin unless already cached.
Not an official Minecraft product. Not approved by or associated with Mojang or Microsoft. You need your own copy of Minecraft: Java Edition 26.3.
Install and update Horizon with the Horizon launcher. If you already have it, it picks this version up by itself. Website: https://playhorizon.dev