Minecraft wiki entry for Bountiful_Update, associated text: Development began the month after 1.7.4 was released. Fifty-two development snapshots were released, from 14w02a to 14w34d – the second most for any major update to date. During a long development period – 236 days long – six subsequent versions of 1.7 were released. The time between releases of 1.7.2 and 1.8 is the second longest time span between major updates, at 312 days. That is over a month longer than the development of Infdev and Alpha combined, and slightly over 2 weeks shorter than the development of Beta. Several iterations of the launcher were also released during this period, from 1.3.9 to 1.5.3.