A (slightly) easier way to install Minecraft natively on Apple Silicon, inspired by https://gist.github.com/tanmayb123/d55b16c493326945385e815453de411a and https://gist.github.com/tanmayb123/d55b16c493326945385e815453de411a#gistcomment-3564251

Easy Minecraft on Apple Silicon.md

How to install Minecraft natively on Apple Silicon, the easiest way possible

1 - Download MultiMC from here

2 - Download Azul Zulu JDK from here (The version you want is Java 17, arm64, macOS, and you download the ZIP file.) Extract the ZIP file, open the folder and copy "zulu-17.jdk" to your home folder.

3 - Download tanmayb123's Minecraft on Apple Silicon package from here. Extract the ZIP and from the folder you are going to copy two files. One, the folder "lwjglnatives", and two, open the Libraries folder and copy "lwjglfat.jar". Move these to your home folder.

4 - Open MultiMC and create a new instance. Right click your instance and click edit instance. Make the following changes:

• In the settings tab, set your Java installation to /Users/<username>/zulu-17.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/java

• In the settings tab, set your Java arguments to -Dorg.lwjgl.librarypath=/Users/<username>/lwjglnatives/ -Dfml.earlyprogresswindow=false

• In the version tab, click LWJGL 3, customize and then edit. It's going to open a file in your text editor. Select everything in that file, delete it all and paste the following:

{
    "formatVersion": 1,
    "libraries": [
        {
            "name": "lwjgl:lwjglfat:1",
            "MMC-hint": "local",
            "MMC-filename": "lwjglfat.jar"
        }
    ],
    "name": "LWJGL 3",
    "releaseTime": "2019-06-24T12:52:52+00:00",
    "type": "release",
    "uid": "org.lwjgl3",
    "version": "3.2.2"
}

• Still in the version tab, click "Open libraries" and in the folder that opens paste the lwjglfat.jar file from earlier.

Now you should be able to run the game from within MultiMC. Click launch and sign in if asked. You can now also install Forge and/or Fabric and whatever mods you would like to use with either.

This worked pretty well for me except there is one very annoying issue: when you open any inventory, cursor is stuck at the center of the screen for ~1 second before you can move it. This is an issue in lwjgl3 itself and it was fixed somewhere in 3.3.x. So I made a nightly 3.3 build of lwjglfat and natives and it works perfect now.
Sharing in case anyone wants it as well: https://www.mediafire.com/file/obfwvvc5uacwy91/m1_lwjgl_330_nightly.zip/file
Minor changes in code I made to make this work described here: LWJGL/lwjgl3#695
Submodule jars packed into single "fat jar" using JarSplice 0.40

What is the "libffi.a" file in the lwjglnatives folder for?

Most likely it's not needed (as it's a static library so I don't see how it could be used), I just copied everything from bin/libs/native/macos/arm64/org/lwjgl in flat structure. Pretty sure a lot of these dylibs are not used as well, but I included everything lwjgl3 provides to be safe.

As far as I know Minecraft only uses lwjgl, lwjgl-glfw, lwjgl-jemalloc, lwjgl-openal, lwjgl-opengl, lwjgl-stb and lwjgl-tinyfd.

So, I cannot find the Azul java 16 jdk for Mac OS. They just seem to skip java 16 altogether on the downloads page

Also where is the home folder, I am confused by that

So, I cannot find the Azul java 16 jdk for Mac OS. They just seem to skip java 16 altogether on the downloads page

Java 16 is considered an old version by Azul now, if you tick "Older Zulu Versions" you'll be able to download it

I don't have an Apple Silicon machine anymore so I can't confirm if Java 17 will work, unless I run into Apple sometime this weekend and try it on a MacBook there, but if I'll be honest I doubt there'd be any issues using Java 17

Also where is the home folder, I am confused by that

It is /Users/YourUsername
so like for example: /Users/Bob

@GoldenAdrien @martinGITHUBER
That's user's home, but in the context of this thread, the question might be about JAVA_HOME environment variable,
which is, in case of Zulu JDK, will be something like this:

/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/zulu-8.jdk/Contents/Home

@GoldenAdrien @martinGITHUBER That's user's home, but in the context of this thread, the question might be about JAVA_HOME environment variable, which is, in case of Zulu JDK, will be something like this:

/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/zulu-8.jdk/Contents/Home

I’m pretty sure they meant the user home folder.

This worked great for me with Java 17 and Minecraft 1.18. However, there was one small problem, which was that Gatekeeper prevented the lwjgl tools from running. I fixed that by running this command that removes them from quarantine:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Users/<username>/lwjglnatives/*

After this, the game launched just fine.

This worked perfectly! The only thing I had to do was go into System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> General" and approve each native library when they attempted to load.

I'm getting a consistent 23 FPS with arm64 vs 15 FPS default Minecraft intel code. But more than that loading is much faster, and the whole experience is much, much faster and responsive. WHAT A DIFFERENCE!

I'm on MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2021); Chip: Apple M1 Pro; Memory 16GB.

@jeffmcclure I think you haven't done something correctly because I'm getting around 60-100 fps on my 14 inch m1 pro which is way more

@martinGITHUBER i am running 32 render distance and 32 simulation with a very large world. I’ve installed optifine and now I’m getting 40fps and above.

I should add that I have also switched over to using ManyMC instead of this gist.

https://github.com/MinecraftMachina/ManyMC

Wrote a quick python script to streamline the process. This one uses the official Minecraft launcher, I feel like this is the cleanest method.
https://github.com/JeffersonDing/arm64-minecarft

This guide is working great for vanilla; I get 100+ fps at native resolution. However installing Sodium completely tanks the frame rate and I only get 10-20 fps. Does anyone have any thoughts on troubleshooting?

Edit: As explained here you need to set the chunk memory allocator setting to swap under video settings > advanced. Completely resolves my issue.