Using Persister

About
Persister is a mod that allowed players to save their inventory in early alpha multiplayer. In early alpha multiplayer (Before 0.2.0), inventories did not save server side. This mod allows the inventory to be saved and loaded client side.

The original mod released in 2010 no longer works due to java issues and also bugs that have appeared in old Minecraft however fortunately the user scam.net created a patch for the mod for a1.0.16_01 - a1.0.16_02 which can be downloaded here.

However the mod does require set-up to work.

Set-up Instructions
The following instructions is for Windows.

Step 1
Make sure that you have java 8 installed in your system. If you do not, you can download it from the Java Website. Other java versions may/will not work.

Step 2
Then you can check if java 8 is the primary path on the system. If you only have java 8 installed or already know its your primary path, you can skip this step. This has to be done because the program for some reason launches itself again once launched.

To do this:
 * 1) Press windows+pause/break and then click on "Advanced system settings".
 * 2) Once there press the "Environment Variables..." button.
 * 3) Under the System variables section at the bottom, click on the "Path" row and press the "Edit..." button.
 * 4) Your java installs should be listed somewhere in this menu, they can be identified by java being in the path. You will need to check what java version each path leads to. This can be done by copying the path and pasting it into the File Explorer address bar. Once you are at the path, you can click on the java.exe and click properties and then details. That will reveal the java version.
 * 5) Once you have located java 8, go back to the environment variables window and select the java 8 path. You can then press the "Move Up" button until its at the very top.
 * 6) Finally you can press "OK" on all three windows.

Step 3
Now we need to set up the Minecraft bin folder to be readable by persister. The bin folder is located in %appdata% .minecraft. If it does not exist, create the bin folder and if it does exist I suggest backing it up.

Setting up the bin folder:
 * 1) Make sure you have betacraft installed and have ran it at least once. Betacraft will provide the libraries relevant for alpha Minecraft.
 * 2) Locate the bin folder for the betacraft launcher. This would be at .betacraft\bin. You will then want to copy all the files from the betacraft bin to the .minecraft bin.
 * 3) Now you will need to download the Minecraft jar. This could be either https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Java_Edition_Alpha_v1.0.16_01 or a1.0.16_02. The Minecraft wiki provides jar downloads on version pages.
 * 4) Move the downloaded Minecraft jar into the .minecraft bin folder and rename it to "minecraft.jar".
 * 5) Lastly create a file with no extension and put the number 1 on the second line using notepad.

Step 4
Locate the persister jar and double click on it. If an error appears just press ok. If it does not load you need to set the .jar file extension to open with java 8. To do this right click on the persister jar and press properties. Then press "Change...", "More apps", scroll down and press "Look for another app on this PC" and locate the java 8 java.exe or javaw.exe. It is typically located in Program Files\Java.

After all the instructions persister should now work and open to a username and password screen, the old minecraft authentication servers went down a long time ago so now just enter your username and it will load in offline mode.