Freshly revealed at Minecraft Live, a main new graphical replace is on the method to Minecraft, titled "Vibrant Visuals."
This upcoming improve will initially be launched for suitable Minecraft: Bedrock Edition units, however there are plans to deliver Vibrant Visuals to Minecraft: Java Edition in the future. It consists of improved visible parts equivalent to directional lighting, volumetric fog, pixelated shadows, and noticeably shimmering water. Purely a visible enhancement, Vibrant Visuals makes no adjustments to Minecraft’s gameplay. For instance, "visual shadows will not impact light levels in a game-mechanics sense, or affect where hostile mobs spawn."
Players will have the ability to toggle between the new and beforehand present visuals of Minecraft with the easy press of a button, which means a traditional look may be maintained by those that want it.
“So the first release is actually in a few months time for the beta platforms”, Agnes Larsson, Minecraft Vanilla’s game director, mentioned.
“There's a lot of testing going on now to try to get it to as many platforms as possible, but it's important that it's high quality and good performance. So yeah, this truly is the start of the journey.”
That journey in the direction of Minecraft’s new look was additional detailed by Maddie Psenka, senior product supervisor on Vibrant Visuals:
“I think it's been a journey for a while. Something that we've wanted to do for the game. There has been past projects that we've had around graphics and wanting to do this kind of update, but I think this time we really wanted to take the space to build the foundations for this new mode. Not getting too ahead of things, making sure things were cross-platform and were really strong so we could build on top of that and release that with the community. We really wanted to give players what they wanted. We know this kind of visual update is something that they've been asking for a bit.”
“We weren't going as fast as we could on PC to make things look really great and call it done”, Psenka continued. “We wanted to make sure it worked on mobile, worked on console. There's a lot of complexities of course, as you can imagine when jumping across platforms and the different backends there. But it's something that we really took our time with to put something forward that we really are proud of.”
This is simply the begin of a new graphical journey for Minecraft, one that can improve and evolve over the subsequent a number of years as the workforce at Mojang steadiness that traditional Minecraft aesthetic with desirous to make it look more like a "modern game."
"As Minecraft continues to evolve, I feel we'll discover new issues so as to add to the graphics over the years, proper?” Jasper Boerstra, Minecraft’s artwork director, mentioned.
“I mean, we're always active development and we're here to stay for a long time. Minecraft is always going on. It's more relevant than ever. So yeah, I think these graphic updates, whenever something comes up or we get new ideas or there's player feedback and forth, we might look into even more features.”
Vibrant Visuals is a free replace coming to Minecraft in the close to future, as Mojang continues to refuse to heavily monetize the best-selling game of all time additional. This philosophy of enhancing and increasing the authentic game additionally goes hand-in-hand with the studio’s desire to not make a “Minecraft 2”, or take advantage of generative AI technology. It could also be 15 years outdated now, however there’s really no signal of Minecraft slowing down.
Check out everything announced at Minecraft Live 2025 for more on what's coming to the game.
Simon Cardy is a Senior Editorial Producer who can primarily be discovered skulking round open world video games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.