VanillaGradle is a toolchain for Minecraft: Java Edition that provides a workspace to interact with the game using official unobfuscated jars provided by Mojang Studios. This plugin requires at least Gradle 9.2.1 and Java 25 to run.

VANILLAGRADLE IS NOT DESIGNED AND IS NOT GENERALLY USEFUL FOR END-USER USE. IT IS FOR TOOLING AND PLATFORM DEVELOPERS WHO HAVE A SOLID WORKING KNOWLEDGE OF GRADLE ONLY!

Documentation

The main documentation for VanillaGradle can be found in the Wiki.

For additional help use the channel #vanillagradle on the Sponge Discord server.

Otherwise, to get a workspace up and going with vanilla Minecraft immediately it is as simple as creating a Gradle build based on this buildscript:

plugins {
    java
    id("org.spongepowered.gradle.vanilla") version "0.3.0"
}

group = "org.example"
version = "1.0-SNAPSHOT"

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
}

minecraft {
    version("26.1") // or: latestRelease() or latestSnapshot()
    runs {
        server()
        client()
    }
}

Within IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse, this will generate run configurations named runClient and runServer

To have browsable sources in-IDE, run ./gradlew decompile

Building VanillaGradle

VanillaGradle uses the Gradle build automation system. To perform a build, use Gradle version 9.2.1 and execute

gradle build

from within the project root directory. (If you do not have Gradle installed on your system you can instead run the supplied Gradle wrapper gradlew)

Version History

Compatibility: We use Semantic Versioning for the user-visible API in VanillaGradle. This applies to every public class outside of the org.spongepowered.gradle.vanilla.internal package. The contents of the internal package are considered implementation details and are subject to change at any time.

Version	Date	Features / Changes
0.3.0	December 2025	Require Java 25 and Gradle 9 Remove de-obfuscation Bump minimum Minecraft version to 26.1-snapshot-1
0.2.2	November 2025	Require Java 11 Improve IntelliJ IDEA project sync performance Compatibility with shadow plugin 9.0.2
0.2.1	November 2025	Use Forge's renamer for remapping rather than Atlas Strip jar signature Support Minecraft 1.19-pre1 client Choose Vineflower as our default decompiler Avoid running asset/native downloads when unnecessary More run options (source set, environment variables)
0.2	May 2021	Run configurations are generated for Eclipse Sources are now visible in-IDE Asset download task now validates existing assets Minecraft artifacts are now only generated when changed, improving build performance Non-access widened jars are stored in a global shared cache rather than per-project Custom version manifests can be provided for out-of-band releases, such as combat snapshots The javaVersion field recently added to Mojang launcher manifests is now used to determine runtime toolchains
0.1	February 2021	Initial Release