Minecraft Bedrock on macOS

Play your own copy of Minecraft Bedrock Edition for Windows on a Mac with Apple silicon, fully offline.

What is this?

Mojang makes Minecraft Bedrock Edition for Windows, phones and consoles, but not for the Mac. This project takes the Windows version of the game that you already own and runs it on a Mac with an M1 chip or newer. It is the real game and not a remake. Survival and creative worlds work, and so do the Nether, the End and the Ender Dragon. A Mac with an M4 chip runs it at about 100 frames per second.

The download contains no game files. You copy the game from a Windows PC on which you own it, and Bedrock Launcher prepares it for the Mac the first time you open it.

Download and play

1. Download Bedrock-Launcher.dmg, open it and drag Bedrock Launcher into your Applications folder.
2. Allow it to open. The app is not signed by Apple, so macOS blocks it the first time. Open it once, then go to System Settings, Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway.
3. Bring your game from Windows. You need the game folder and a memory dump of the running game. The guide shows how to get both in about 15 minutes.
4. Open the app. It asks for the folder, the dump and a player name, prepares the game in about five minutes and starts it. From then on, opening the app starts the game straight away.

You need a Mac with Apple silicon and a copy of Minecraft for Windows version 1.26.52. It was tested on macOS 27. If Rosetta 2 is missing, the app offers to install it.

What does not work

• Everything online is unavailable, including signing in, Realms, the Marketplace and multiplayer servers.
• The game pauses when its window loses focus, as it does on Windows.
• The game always starts in a window. Press F11 in the game for fullscreen.
• Only version 1.26.52 of the game has been tested.

How it was made

The whole port was reverse engineered by Claude Opus 5.5, which ran a swarm of Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 agents. The agents rebuilt the encrypted executable from a memory dump, ran the game under Wine with exception logging, and read the code around each crash with disassembly scripts guided by the assertion strings left in the binary. Every crash was traced to its cause and fixed in WineGDK, Wine or a small stand-in DLL, and Haiku agents played the game to test each fix.

For developers

Build from source

The disk image is built from this repository, and you can build everything yourself instead of downloading it. You need these.

• Xcode with Apple's Metal toolchain (xcodebuild -downloadComponent MetalToolchain).

• Homebrew with these packages:

  brew install llvm lld mingw-w64 bison flex meson ninja cmake pkgconf python

• About 30 GB of free disk space and one to two hours for the first build.

Then run the setup with the game folder and the dump:

./setup.sh --game "/path/to/the/game/folder" --dump "/path/to/Minecraft.Windows.exe_....dmp"

It checks the requirements, then downloads and builds GnuTLS, FreeType, WineGDK, LLVM 15 and DXMT into build/. It also rebuilds the game's executable from the dump and creates a Wine prefix in prefix/. You can run it again at any time, and it skips the steps that are already done. To play, double-click Play Minecraft.command or run:

tools/play_minecraft.sh

Add HUD=1 in front of the command to show Apple's frame rate overlay. The player name comes from your macOS account name, and PLAYER_NAME=Steve tools/play_minecraft.sh sets another one. Your worlds are saved in prefix/drive_c/users/<you>/AppData/Roaming/Minecraft Bedrock/Users/Shared/games/com.mojang/minecraftWorlds.

To build the app and the disk image from your build, run scripts/build-app.sh. It writes dist/Bedrock-Launcher.dmg.

How it works

docs/how-it-works.md describes every layer and the bugs that had to be fixed. The short version is below.

• The executable is encrypted on disk, so tools/ rebuilds it from a full memory dump. The tools restore its import table and undo the start-up state the dump captured.
• patches/wine-gdk adds the parts of the Xbox GDK runtime this game needs, fixes a heap overrun in WineGDK's async code and fixes Wine's mouse support through GameInput.
• patches/dxmt makes DXMT build with current Xcode.
• stubs/ holds small stand-in DLLs, including an offline replacement for the game's HTTP library.
• tools/patch_fmod.py guards FMOD's mixer against a divide by zero at start-up.

Repository layout

Path	Contents
setup.sh	Builds everything and prepares your copy of the game
Play Minecraft.command	Starts the game from Finder
scripts/	The setup steps, one script per component, and build-app.sh
app/	The launcher inside Bedrock Launcher.app and the code that draws its icon
patches/	Patches for WineGDK and DXMT, applied to pinned upstream versions
stubs/	Stand-in Windows DLLs, a seed persona profile and their build script
tools/	The executable rebuild pipeline, the game runner and the launcher
tools/trace/	Builds a copy of the executable with logging detours
tools/winput/	A small Windows program that sends keys and mouse input to the game
tools/dev/	Helpers for screenshots, input and disassembly while debugging
site/	The project website, published with GitHub Pages
docs/	How to get the game files and how the port works

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome. When you report a bug, say which Mac and macOS version you use and attach the newest log from ~/Library/Application Support/Bedrock Launcher/out (or out/ if you built from source). Never attach your memory dump or any game files, because the dump can contain sign-in tokens and the game files are Mojang's.

Keep each pull request to one fix and use Conventional Commits for the messages. A change to Wine goes in as a new numbered patch in patches/wine-gdk, made with git format-patch in build/src/wine-gdk, so that a fresh ./setup.sh picks it up. Help with other versions of the game is especially useful, because the tools contain addresses that only match version 1.26.52.

Licence

The scripts, tools and stubs in this repository are under the MIT licence in LICENSE. The patches in patches/wine-gdk change WineGDK and fall under its LGPL 2.1 licence. The patches in patches/dxmt change DXMT and fall under its MIT licence. The app bundles builds of Wine, GnuTLS, Nettle, GMP, FreeType, DXMT and Python, and their licence texts are in Contents/Resources/licenses inside the app. Minecraft is a trademark of Mojang Synergies AB, and this project is not affiliated with Mojang or Microsoft.