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Reading a Latest.log

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04Slash edited this page Jan 29, 2021 · 11 revisions

WIP. This page is incomplete.

Here I will go over what information you should be looking for in a latest.log file but first I should go over a few things.

  • The latest.log file will contain a list of information about what has happened since Minecraft was opened to the time it was closed. This list will likely be 10’s of thousands of lines long and can even be 100’s of thousands depending on how long the game has be opened.
  • The latest.log will always show the information from the current or last time the game has been started.
  • Almost all the information in the latest.log is not important. It’s a log of everything that happened, not all the issues that are present. There is a very small portion of information at the very start (more-so useful for diagnosing someone else’s issues) and a bit of information at the end of the log that looks very much like the stacktrace covered in the “Reading Crash Reports” section.
  • Latest.logs are not deleted after starting the game again. They are stored in .gz files (essentially a .zip file) with a name that corresponds to the date is was created (time excluded).


I won’t go too much into detail about the first bit of information since it’s not very useful for this tutorial. It does supply some useful information which can help out in very specific cases like using a wrong Forge + Minecraft versions or using 32-bit java. Here we see the forge version being loaded, Forge Mod Loader version 14.23.5.2854, the minecraft version being loaded, for Minecraft 1.12.2 loading, if a 64-bit version of java is being used, Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM, and the operating system as well as if it’s 32-bit or 64-bit; On Windows specifically, 32-bit = Windows 10:x86:10.0. 64-Bit = Windows 10:amd64:10.0.


These bits of information will be before each line to indicate what each line is doing. There’s a few more that I didn’t add since they’re almost never important. This tells you if the client was doing something or the server. The most important one here is Fatal. Warnings and Errors can mostly be ignored. In my latest.log of 40k lines ~5% of lines were warnings and ~5% were errors. Yea, not super helpful with that many warnings and errors and these normally don’t indicate an issue on your end nor is it likely to be causing a crash. Fatal usually means something went very wrong and should be looked at. This won’t always be what caused the crash, but at this point the issue might never be clear.


This is an example of a Fatal issue that isn’t important to the crash. It might indicate an issue when we finally do get ingame, but for now this information is not important.

WIP – Add section where the crash report doesn’t state useful information but a small section above the crash report in the latest.log provides more information.

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