Gaming • October 2025 - Getting Minecraft Bedrock to run on RPi 5

This is an experience report of getting Minecraft Bedrock to run on RPi 5. I don't claim that this is the best, or even 100% correct way to do it, but I succeeded in my task. Along the way, I've run into so many problems getting MB to work, I figured it's worth documenting the straight path that I found. It's part documentation for myself (if I have to go through this again) and hopefully this will help others, too.

Background: Minecraft on RPi requires the use of a launcher called MCPELauncher. The "standard" way to get that launcher onto your device is through Pi-Apps. The problem is, the MCPELauncher bundled with Pi-Apps is extremely outdated. I didn't find a way to update it. Earlier this year I was still able to get Minecraft to run with it but around September 2025 something with Google APIs or so changed, and the launcher stopped working (pretty sure it was this issue: https://github.com/minecraft-linux/mcpe ... ssues/1373).

So in order to get a relatively new MC version running on my RPi 5, I first had to figure out how to install the mcpelauncher manually. Then find an MC version that actually runs on my device.

Steps to install a working version of MC:
1. apt didn't find the mcpelauncher package, so I used flatpack instead.2. Restart device.
3. Run launcher from Games menu. If missing, run from command line:4. Go through initial setup routine. Log into Google account.
5. Go ahead and hit the green Download and Play button. By default, this is configured for the latest version available on Google. This version did not work for me.
6. I ended up going back to 1.21.60, as that was the version that had run successfully before I got rid of everything Pi-Apps related. For that, click on the dropdown showing Default and select Add new profile.... In the dialog, type in a name, like "1.21.xxx" and select the version that you'd like to try out. Save the new profile and hit the Download and Play button again.

Best of luck!

Notes:

• The minecraftWorlds folder from the Pi-Apps version can be found under /home/[user]/.local/share/mcpelauncher/games/com.mjang/minecraftWorlds.
• The new minecraftWorlds folder can be found under /home/[user]/.var/app/io.mram.mcpelauncher/data/mcpelauncher/games/commojang/minecraftWorlds, in case you had MC running under Pi-Apps and would like to keep your old worlds.
• With the old Pi-Apps version I had to add the following env var to allow MC to start. This env var no longer seems to be necessary with the version I'm using, 1.21.60. But just in case...

  Code:

  export QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb

• Versions, for reference:
  - Bootloader: 69471177
  - Debian: 12.11
  - MCPELauncher: 1.5.1 (Build 96)
  - Minecraft: 1.21.60

Statistics: Posted by tinker_dad — Sun Oct 12, 2025 2:37 am

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