I've been trying to work out if thrown snowballs, in any vanilla version, have been able to hit, as in cause the damage animation and knockback (not necessarily actually taken away hearts, and not just disappearing on collision), other players in vanilla Minecraft? If so, in what version did this occur?
I've been searching about this for a while, but have only found conflicting claims:
- The IGN wiki claims "If an almost defeated enemy tries to tower up high into the sky to escape, you can simply throw snoballs [sic] at him until he falls down."
- The Minecraft wiki makes no mention of snowballs affecting players, or ever having done so
- Many people seem to remember having snowball fights, even on unmodded servers.
- Snowballs being unable to hit players is marked as a "bug" in the bug tracker, yet the mods too seem unsure whether this was ever actually a feature
- There are Bukkit plugins which allow snowballs to damage players, which may be a cause of the confusion
- I personally checked the following versions in vanilla survival, and snowballs did no knockback or damage:
- 1.8.3 full release (Latest version)
- 1.2.5 full release
- 1.0.0 full release
- 1.8 beta
- 1.4 beta
- 1.0 beta
- 1.2.1 alpha
- 1.0.5 alpha (The first version in which snowballs existed)
- I cannot find anywhere/anyone that gives a version when this change was supposedly made.
In general, people seem very certain of remembering it, but are unable to provide evidence. If it is the case that snowballs once did knockback, it should be relatively easy to find or record a short clip showing so and post it; doing so is what I want for the answer to this question.
Is there any proof that snowballs knocking back players was actually ever a vanilla feature? If you believe this was once a vanilla feature give proof or a version number. I want an actual answer to this question, not just more of what people remember as I have listed above.
Best Answer
No. In vanilla Minecraft on a vanilla server, snowballs and other throwables do not hit players.
It's simply occam's razor; if snowballs didn't hit the player in alpha 1.0.5, and don't hit the player in release 1.8.4 (and also all versions after release 1.4.4, as confirmed in MC-3179), and there is no indication in any changelog that the behavior changed, let alone changed twice in between those versions, it stands to reason that such a change did not occur.
There are some server plug-ins that change this behavior, though. Snowball Damage is a Bukkit plugin that does precisely what it says on the tin. Similar plugins with similar functionalities exist. This is likely where the confusion comes. Many, many servers use Bukkit (in 2012, 80% of servers were running Bukkit. More current statistics are unavailable), so many users may have been exposed to such plugins, and are remembering behavior that does not exist in vanilla.