Hello,

I would like to address a problem considering two of your Forge clients. Before that I wanna say that I've been downloading from Forge for years now and this never happened before.

First, I wanna talk about the one that was less destructive, that is the 1.18.2 forge client that was the recommended download. This client would always crash and always give us the error code -805306396, which we looked up and nothing came up when we did.

Second, and the reason why I am making this complain, was the 1.16.5 forge client that i think almost gave me a virus.

Let me explain what happened;

So me and my friend were downloading mods on my PC and we needed the 1.16.5 client for them to work. Once we finished downloading the mods (from CurseForge). We opened the Minecraft launcher and launched the game, to which we were met with a small window of the same size as the starting MC window, which was bright red and had a dark red logo of Forge on it with random code going wild, with something like xxx (random numbers) out of xxx (xxx/xxx) and other random code, before the game went full screen and the random code was still there, I also have my normal MC starter logo set to black and white but when this one when launched it was red and white like when it's set by default.

Of course I immediately turned off my computer due to panic, and after a while turned it back on to start the clean up process, turning the WiFi off, deleting stuff related to Forge, Java and Minecraft (etc. that could have been the case or could have got infected) And that kind of stuff you do when you think you have a virus.

Luckily my pc wasn't damaged, either thanks to us to interrupting the game from loading by turning off the computer or by the other cleaning stuff we did i mentioned above.

That's all I wanna say, please check your clients and website for any possible malicious software/code/programs/etc.

Thank you for reading this and I'm looking forward to hearing from you, if you address this problem I would be very happy to hear about it and if you do find something malicious please give me an update.

Have a nice day

On the first point, the error code shown to the user by the launcher dialog box is from the JVM. It has no useful information for troubleshooting, and we do not have control over it. Troubleshooting should begin by investigating the logging output (from the launcher log window and the logs/debug.log file), as that usually contains the actual information relevant to the issue.

On the second point, since Forge 1.13, the early loading window has never shown any version of the Forge logo in any position or orientation (except with the window icon, visible from the taskbar). At most, it should have the Mojang logo front and center, with colored text scrolling by on the left side.

It is impossible to investigate this further without more information: the list of mods installed, the debug.log file, the method by which Forge was installed, even a screenshot of the loading screen which you assumed to be malicious.

We have not heard of any reports with regards to possible malicious software included in any official Forge installer of any version.

You may have installed a mod which does those alterations to the loading screen, but without the mod list, I can only suggest that as a possibiility. I personally doubt that the game was doing anything malicious; I guess it was probably just a mod which enhanced the loading screen with more loading information.

As a final note, our official support policy is that we only provide support for the Latest and LTS versions (as per the forum banner pinned at the top), which makes 1.16.5 an unsupported version. Until we have corroborating reports on the suspicion of malicious software in any official Forge installer/download, we can not help you further on that issue, sorry.