Java Edition 14w30a

14w30a is the thirty-eighth snapshot for Java Edition 1.8, released on July 23, 2014,^[1]^[2] which adds banners.

Additions

Over 16×400⁶ possible combinations – 6.5536×10¹⁶.
Crafted like a sign, just with one color of wool instead of planks.
Can be stacked to 16.
Most patterns are created by arranging dyes in certain ways around a banner on a crafting table.
- The dyes cannot be shifted or flipped even if there is space, known as a fixed recipe.
Additional patterns: creeper, skull & crossbones, brick, and flower - making these without dyes results in a black pattern, one can use dyes to get different colors (items: creeper skull, wither skeleton skull, brick block, oxeye daisy).
33 crafting recipes which produce different patterns.
Up to 6 layers of patterns possible.
Can be placed on walls or on the ground (16 rotations possible).
Sway as if blown by wind.
Can be cloned by crafting them together with a blank banner.
Can be worn as headgear (but only using commands).
Top-most layer can be removed using cauldrons.

New Silent tag for entities.
- Setting to 1 disables sound produced by that entity, such as idle and hurt sounds.

stat.talkedToVillager
- Detects how many times the player has talked to villagers (opened the trading GUI).
stat.tradedWithVillager
- Detects how many times the player has traded with villagers.

Made creeper, skeleton and zombie heads available in Survival.
Creepers, skeletons, wither skeletons, and zombies drop their heads when killed by charged creepers. Wither skeletons continue to have heads as rare drops.
Skulls worn on heads are now bigger so the 2nd skin layer no longer peeks through.
Player and mob heads in inventories and held by mobs/players now display the actual head.

/summon

Lighting

Now displays how many chunk sections are being rendered currently and how many chunk sections are out of view in percent, the OpenGL version, display size, vendor and GPU.
"Vanilla" added to the version number. e.g., "Minecraft 14w30b (14w30b/Vanilla)".
- Presumably this says something different if modded.
F3 + H tooltips now show how many NBT tags an item has.
Block names no longer contain blockstate data in brackets next to their name (in the view of a block's name and data along the right side of the screen).
Data is still shown in separate rows beneath the name.

Animations

Third person sword blocking position slightly tweaked
Block hitting animation redone
Punching while blocking, shooting an arrow, drinking a potion, and eating removed
Rod scaling tweaked
Removed armor turning red when hit
Items are now positioned a little higher and further left during their eating/drinking animation in first person view^[4]

Video settings

Render distance slider now goes up to 32 when using 64-bit Java.
- Requires 2 GB of allocated RAM.
Removed Advanced OpenGL.

Performance improvements

Rewrote chunk sorting.
Ported over the visibility culling code from MCPE to avoid rendering invisible stuff.
Threaded chunk rebuilds.

From released versions before 1.8

MC-7508 – Lighting error due to Chunk.heightMap ignoring block at the top level of an ExtendedBlockStorage instance (off by 1 error).
MC-30568 – /summon command can't summon lightning.
MC-32514 – The well in a desert village is made out of the wrong material/cobblestone.
MC-58823 – options.txt has advancedOpengl:true also for graphic cards without Advanced OpenGL in video settings.

From the 1.8 development versions

MC-46225 – Falling sand can replace pistons, destroying them.
MC-56897 – Chunks don't render.
MC-57895 – Stairs are backwards in the creative inventory and hotbar.
MC-58790 – Sign with /give / /replaceitem doesn't update player inventory.
MC-59259 – Breaking block below tall plants causes them to drop two items.
MC-59979 – Bug in the F3 menu.
MC-60301 – Broken resource packs: game crashes when I try to load 14w27a/b.
MC-60552 – Flower pots with metadata placed in 1.7 will not render in 1.8 snapshots/metadata not removed.
MC-61191 – Sandstone stairs bug in desert villages.
MC-62127 – Turning off VSync crashes the game.
MC-62138 – "#PLAYER" appears on sidebar.
MC-62180 – /testfor @p doesn't consider x, y, z anymore.
MC-62493 – "/worldborder get" can display invalid size using "/worldborder add".
MC-62655 – Cubic player selector always finds player if there are more than 31 entities around.

From the previous development version

MC-62170 – Carpet has incorrect height.
MC-62223 – Crash in Video Settings menu.
MC-62240 – Command selector parameters dx, dy and dz don't work.
MC-62267 – Game crashes when trying to enable VSync.
MC-62342 – Slabs can not be placed in adventure mode with tag CanPlaceOn.
MC-62349 – Hopper: java.lang.NullPointerException: Saving entity NBT.
MC-62379 – Spawners (dungeons, strongholds, etc...) can spawn mobs outside of worldborder.
MC-62419 – Hopper: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Cannot get property bcy{name{{=}}half, clazz=class ats, values{{=}}[upper, lower]} as it does not exist in bch{block=minec.
MC-62499 – /replaceitem block has incorrect syntax.
MC-62504 – /kill adds 214748364 / 0xCCCCCCC to "Damage Taken" statistics.
MC-62507 – Overlapping dungeons don't spawn correctly.
MC-62558 – Rendering empty chunks/cubes in 14w29b (or number of rendered chunks on debug screen (C) is wrong).
MC-62736 – /replaceitem command not updated when the command was executed with a sign.
MC-62789 – Chunks containing paintings may be wiped and regenerated upon load.

14w30a was previously removed from the launcher for some time, but was added back in September 2018.