Bug in Minecraft Dungeons could wipe your PC data

Facepalm: Plenty of new games ship with bugs, but this one’s a lot more severe than the usual glitches: It could potentially wipe a drive of data. The problem is with Minecraft Dungeons, and it could erase your computer’s data when uninstalling the game. Thankfully, there’s a simple fix.

The dungeon-crawling Minecraft spin-off arrived on May 26 to fair-to-good reviews, with many describing it as a family-friendly Diablo. But developer Mojang Studios has released a bug report that reads: “If you have installed Minecraft Dungeons in a custom directory, there is a chance uninstalling the Minecraft Dungeons Launcher and/or the game will remove the parent directory and everything in it.”

That means, of course, if you chose to install the game under c:Minecraft Dungeons and later decide to uninstall it using Windows’ Add/Remove Programs tool, all data on the C: drive could be wiped.

The issue was brought to Mojang’s attention after a Twitter user wrote that uninstalling the launcher wiped out his entire games SSD.

Minecraft Dungeons might wipe your SSD if you uninstall it pic.twitter.com/WJY2fbBLws

— Windows 98 Tech Support (@Win98Tech) May 26, 2020

Mojang said that the problem only affects versions of the game with the launcher, meaning the one in the Windows Store is safe. Tom’s Hardware reports that a hotfix is now available, which can be applied by restarting the launcher.

Mojang warns that before uninstalling anything, users must ensure that the Minecraft Dungeons launcher uses Bootstrap 166 or higher. This can be checked by going to Settings > About > Bootstrap. If the number is lower than 166, just restart the launcher.

Marcio Oliveira, Tech Lead for the Minecraft and Minecraft Dungeons Launcher, shed more light on the bug. “When a player selected a custom ‘Install Location’ in the Dungeons installation dialog, the Dungeons Launcher was taking that location and naively considering that only files written by the Dungeons Launcher would live there.”

“Thus, when uninstalling the Launcher, the uninstall logic would simply delete that ‘Install Location’ folder, to leave no traces of program files created by the Launcher on disk.”

“We are very sorry for the inconvenience this might have caused to players and will surely take this as a learning experience for improving our quality assurance process.”