Minecraft Dungeons oversight wipes out entire install folder.
Minecraft Dungeons released today and will be the topic of an impressions piece once I’m done writing it up. For now however, I wanted to pass along a note of warning to anyone who installed MD on their PC in a custom location; you’re going to want to make sure the game is fully updated before you try to uninstall it.
Posted to Mojang’s bug reporter and confirmed by a staffer to be fixed, Minecraft Dungeons had this odd programming quirk where it assumes that the only things in its download location are going to be the game itself. So when you uninstall the game it just uninstalls everything in that folder.
If you have installed Minecraft Dungeons in a custom directory, there is a chance uninstalling Minecraft Dungeons Launcher and/or the game will remove the entire parent directory and everything in it.
Before uninstalling anything, please ensure the Minecraft Dungeons Launcher atleast uses Bootstrap version 166 or higher. You can check this at Settings > About > Bootstrap.
Restarting the launcher should give you the new version.
Marcio Oliveira from Mojang commented that this was an oversight in how the installer was built and has been fixed.
When a player selected a custom “Install Location” in the Dungeons installation dialog, the Dungeons Launcher was taking that location and naively considering that only files written by the Dungeons Launcher would live there. Thus, when uninstalling the Launcher, the uninstall logic would simply delete that “Install Location” folder, to leave no traces of program files created by the Launcher on disk.
We didn’t consider that the custom location chosen by players could also have files belonging to other programs in it. And unfortunately, we didn’t catch that in tests. So the bug would only impact players who had selected a custom install location for Dungeons where other program files also exist, then tried to uninstall the Dungeons Launcher.
This specifically affects the launcher version and not the Windows Store version of Minecraft Dungeons. The oversight has been fixed as of version 166 which you can see by clicking settings > about.
MMO Fallout 