diff --git a/NEWS.md b/NEWS.md
index fbfeb601..b823cb54 100644
--- a/NEWS.md
+++ b/NEWS.md
@@ -74,7 +74,7 @@ Changes to paftools.js:
 
 Although given the many bug fixes and minor improvements, the core algorithm
 stays the same. This version of minimap2 produces nearly identical alignments
-to v2.17 except corner cases.
+to v2.17 except very rare corner cases.
 
 Now unimap is recommended over minimap2 for aligning long contigs against a
 reference genome. It often takes less wall-clock time and is much more
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index ae6eac50..9b4dfe94 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -76,8 +76,8 @@ Detailed evaluations are available from the [minimap2 paper][doi] or the
 Minimap2 is optimized for x86-64 CPUs. You can acquire precompiled binaries from
 the [release page][release] with:
 ```sh
-curl -L https://github.com/lh3/minimap2/releases/download/v2.17/minimap2-2.17_x64-linux.tar.bz2 | tar -jxvf -
-./minimap2-2.17_x64-linux/minimap2
+curl -L https://github.com/lh3/minimap2/releases/download/v2.18/minimap2-2.18_x64-linux.tar.bz2 | tar -jxvf -
+./minimap2-2.18_x64-linux/minimap2
 ```
 If you want to compile from the source, you need to have a C compiler, GNU make
 and zlib development files installed. Then type `make` in the source code
diff --git a/cookbook.md b/cookbook.md
index 6cb4d5fa..f963cccf 100644
--- a/cookbook.md
+++ b/cookbook.md
@@ -31,8 +31,8 @@ To acquire the data used in this cookbook and to install minimap2 and paftools,
 please follow the command lines below:
 ```sh
 # install minimap2 executables
-curl -L https://github.com/lh3/minimap2/releases/download/v2.17/minimap2-2.17_x64-linux.tar.bz2 | tar jxf -
-cp minimap2-2.17_x64-linux/{minimap2,k8,paftools.js} .  # copy executables
+curl -L https://github.com/lh3/minimap2/releases/download/v2.18/minimap2-2.18_x64-linux.tar.bz2 | tar jxf -
+cp minimap2-2.18_x64-linux/{minimap2,k8,paftools.js} .  # copy executables
 export PATH="$PATH:"`pwd`                               # put the current directory on PATH
 # download example datasets
 curl -L https://github.com/lh3/minimap2/releases/download/v2.10/cookbook-data.tgz | tar zxf -
diff --git a/main.c b/main.c
index 7c9255ca..395c0d97 100644
--- a/main.c
+++ b/main.c
@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@
 #include "mmpriv.h"
 #include "ketopt.h"
 
-#define MM_VERSION "2.17-r1013-dirty"
+#define MM_VERSION "2.18-r1015"
 
 #ifdef __linux__
 #include <sys/resource.h>
diff --git a/minimap2.1 b/minimap2.1
index 9e555433..f1327804 100644
--- a/minimap2.1
+++ b/minimap2.1
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-.TH minimap2 1 "4 May 2019" "minimap2-2.17 (r941)" "Bioinformatics tools"
+.TH minimap2 1 "9 April 2021" "minimap2-2.18 (r1015)" "Bioinformatics tools"
 .SH NAME
 .PP
 minimap2 - mapping and alignment between collections of DNA sequences
diff --git a/misc/paftools.js b/misc/paftools.js
index 111e96d5..13e9b6d7 100755
--- a/misc/paftools.js
+++ b/misc/paftools.js
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 #!/usr/bin/env k8
 
-var paftools_version = '2.17-r982-dirty';
+var paftools_version = '2.18-r1015';
 
 /*****************************
  ***** Library functions *****
diff --git a/python/mappy.pyx b/python/mappy.pyx
index 32735144..fbbc8ab8 100644
--- a/python/mappy.pyx
+++ b/python/mappy.pyx
@@ -3,7 +3,7 @@ from libc.stdlib cimport free
 cimport cmappy
 import sys
 
-__version__ = '2.17'
+__version__ = '2.18'
 
 cmappy.mm_reset_timer()
 
diff --git a/setup.py b/setup.py
index e4959ec9..960775af 100644
--- a/setup.py
+++ b/setup.py
@@ -23,7 +23,7 @@ def readme():
 
 setup(
 	name = 'mappy',
-	version = '2.17',
+	version = '2.18',
 	url = 'https://github.com/lh3/minimap2',
 	description = 'Minimap2 python binding',
 	long_description = readme(),