Minecraft Forums

A few weeks ago, I got a brand new gaming laptop and a couple days later, I came on here asking how I could transfer Minecraft, which I bought on my old laptop, to my new one without having to re-buy it. People suggested that I take my .minecraft folder, place it on a thumb drive, and then move it over to my new LT that way. So this is what I did: I made a folder titled Minecraft stuff, and in that folder I placed the .Minecraft folder, my folder with all of my downloaded texture packs, a folder with all of my downloaded adventure maps, the desktop shortcuts for Minecraft ver 1.5 and 1.6, and the desktop short cuts for MCPatcher ver 3 and ver 4. Once I got the folder transfered over, I moved the shortcuts onto the desktop and decided to check everything, to make sure all was right in the world. All was not right with the world. I logged into Minecraft, and went to load up one of my worlds and found all of my world saves were missing. I decided to check and see if my texture packs were still there and found my texture pack folder (ver 1.5) and resource pack folder (ver 1.6) were both empty. I ran both versions of MC Patcher to see if that fixed the problem with my TPs and RPs, but it had no effect. Now here's the funny thing, if I go into the folders themselves on the desktop and all my world saves and my texture packs and resource packs are still in their respective folders. But for some reason, Minecraft is not seeing them and I'm not sure why. I even went onto my old system to check and see if I had the same problem. Sure enough, I did. I'm not sure what to do at this point, any help or suggestions would be great. Thanks.

You have to replace the .minecraft folder in your %appdata% folder. Just putting the folder on your desktop won't make Minecraft use it.

Quote from FlubbyGrubber

You have to replace the .minecraft folder in your %appdata% folder. Just putting the folder on your desktop won't make Minecraft use it.

That doesn't make any sense, but I'll give it a shot. The .minecraft folder is still in the folder titled Minecraft stuff.

Edit: Okay, turns out there was a .minecraft folder already in the appdata folder to begine with. All I had to do was copy my world saves, TPs, and RPs and paste them into their respective folders. Thanks for the help FlubbyGrubber.

I'll re-word it then. When you went and got the .minecraft folder from your old computer, you went to the appdata folder. Now you need to take that, go to the appdata folder on the new computer and put it there again. It will overwrite the folder, and add your worlds, texture packs, etc. to Minecraft on your new computer.

Replies in bold.

Quote from Ryker61

That doesn't make any sense, but I'll give it a shot. The .minecraft folder is still in the folder titled Minecraft stuff.
It actually does make sense because Minecraft uses the .minecraft folder in %appdata% by default, and makes one (downloading required files in the process) if it doesn't exist. Minecraft doesn't search your entire computer for the folder. It looks for the folder in %appdata%. In the new launcher, there's an option in the profile called "Game Directory". If you change this, then Minecraft will look for the folder in the path that you set (meaning that you can have it called something other than .minecraft). This is what FlubbyGrubber meant when he/she said that putting the folder on your desktop won't make Minecraft use it.

Edit: Okay, turns out there was a .minecraft folder already in the appdata folder to begine with. All I had to do was copy my world saves, TPs, and RPs and paste them into their respective folders. Thanks for the help FlubbyGrubber.
There was a .minecraft folder because you already played the game before looking for the folder. When you loaded Minecraft, it looked in %appdata% for the .minecraft folder (since that's the default setting). Since your laptop was new, the folder did not exist, so it made one (which has no mods or texture packs, obviously). Although you had a folder on your desktop, Minecraft does did not look for the folder there, so it generated a new one.

Since a new folder was generated when you ran Minecraft, you simply need to copy over the files, which is what you did. Hope this makes you understand things better.