For a very long time now, Minecraft has been targeting Java 6, and the most accepted reason being that the Mac clients do not have native support to download any other version of Java. But today, it’s time. It’s time to make that upgrade. Mojang is soon completing their upgrade to the Mac launcher that will bundle Java 8, eliminating the final obstruction to upgrading Minecraft to a newer and supported Java version.

Today, we announce that SpongeAPI and its implementations will be moving to Java 8 fullstop. If you’re renting a server from a professional Minecraft Server hoster, you may already be running Java 8. If you are certain you’re not running the server on Java 8, but an older version, you will need to upgrade.

Here are some links to installing Java 8:

Linux | Mac OS X | Windows

While it may be some time before we do make the move to targeting Java 8, we encourage you to already have upgraded to Java 8 on all machines regardless, not doing so is opening the possibility of security issues.

For developers

What does this mean? It means in the API, we’ll be dropping the use of Guava’s Optional in favor of Java’s Optional. While the two do the same things, one is born from Java and the other is born from a dependency. There are quite a few other places throughout the API that will change, but for the most part, the implementations will benefit from this move. If you are making any contributions to the implementation, be sure to take a stab at learning some of the new features of Java 8 and employ them in your implementations!