After 10 years, one of Minecraft's most infamous bugs has been fixed

A new Minecraft test patch has fixed two decade-old bugs, including one of the most infamous issues in the game's history.

When you take damage in Minecraft, your character lurches to the left. That's been the case since 2012, but that's not how it's supposed to work. Instead, your character is supposed to react by lurching in the opposite direction of incoming damage. So if an arrow hits you in the back, your character is supposed to lean forward, which would give you a clear indication of where that damage is coming from.

The universal lean to the left that now indicates damage, regardless of which direction it's coming from, was a bug exclusive to multiplayer Minecraft. When the 1.3.1 update merged single-player and multiplayer worlds way back in 2012, this 'damage wobble' issue became a problem on both sides of the game.

'Damage wobble no longer shows direction of incoming damage' has been listed on the official Minecraft bug tracker since 2013, and while it's not the oldest remaining bug in the game, it's one that the community has been keen to see fixed, and one developer Mojang has been resolute about not addressing. Million-view YouTube videos have promoted mods fixing the damage wobble bug, while Mojang has occasionally marked the bug as one it officially "won't fix".

But now, with Minecraft snapshot 23W03A, Mojang has officially fixed the damage wobble issue. If you're not familiar with Minecraft snapshots, they're basically beta patches where players can test out features and bug fixes before they hit the live game. If no issues are found, the damage wobble fix should go live in the full game as part of the 1.19.4 update.

This snapshot also fixes another decade-old bug, where "sprinting isn't canceled when dismounting rideable entities while sprinting" - a pernicious issue that's only been half-fixed in previous patches. If you ever get curious about how many Minecraft bugs there are left to solve, you can see the oldest issues on the bug tracker for yourself. Maybe someday they'll even be fixed.

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.