Exciting news for Minecraft fans: a major graphical update named "Vibrant Visuals" was unveiled at Minecraft Live. This update will first roll out to devices compatible with Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, with plans to extend it to Minecraft: Java Edition later. The update brings enhanced visual features like directional lighting, volumetric fog, pixelated shadows, and shimmering water effects. Importantly, these are purely visual upgrades and won't alter the core gameplay mechanics. For instance, the new visual shadows won't affect light levels or influence where hostile mobs spawn.
Minecraft Vibrant Visuals Comparison Screenshots
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Players can easily switch between the new and original visuals with a single button press, catering to those who prefer the classic look.
Agnes Larsson, the game director for Minecraft Vanilla, shared that the initial beta release for Vibrant Visuals is slated for a few months from now. "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," Larsson stated.
Maddie Psenka, the senior product manager for Vibrant Visuals, elaborated on the development process: "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."
Psenka further added, "We weren't going as fast as we could on PC to make things look really great and call it done. 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 just the beginning of a new graphical journey for Minecraft, aimed at enhancing the game's visuals while preserving its iconic aesthetic. Jasper Boerstra, Minecraft's art director, expressed enthusiasm for the future: "As Minecraft continues to evolve, I think we'll find new things to add to the graphics over the years, right? I mean, we're always in 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 update coming soon to Minecraft, reflecting Mojang's commitment to enhancing the game without heavy monetization. This approach aligns with their stance against creating a "Minecraft 2" or leveraging generative AI technology. Despite being 15 years old, Minecraft shows no signs of slowing down.
For more on what's coming to the game, check out everything announced at Minecraft Live 2025.
