"Minecraft's 'Vibrant Visuals' Begin New Graphical Journey"

Exciting news for Minecraft fans! Unveiled at Minecraft Live, a stunning new graphical update named "Vibrant Visuals" is set to transform the visual experience of the game. This update will first roll out to devices running Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, with plans to extend it to Minecraft: Java Edition later on. The update promises to enhance the game's aesthetics with features like directional lighting, volumetric fog, pixelated shadows, and shimmering water effects. Importantly, these visual upgrades are purely cosmetic and will not alter the core gameplay mechanics of Minecraft. For instance, the new visual shadows will not affect light levels or the spawning of hostile mobs within the game.

Minecraft Vibrant Visuals Comparison Screenshots

10 ImagesPlayers can easily switch between the new visuals and the classic look with a simple button press, ensuring that everyone can enjoy their preferred aesthetic.

Agnes Larsson, Minecraft Vanilla’s game director, shared that the first beta release of 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,” she said.

Maddie Psenka, senior product manager on Vibrant Visuals, elaborated on the journey behind this update: “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 emphasized the team's commitment to cross-platform compatibility: “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.”

Jasper Boerstra, Minecraft’s art director, spoke about the future of the game's graphics: “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 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 will be a free update for Minecraft, reflecting Mojang's ongoing commitment to enhancing the game without resorting to heavy monetization. This approach aligns with the studio’s decision to not pursue a “Minecraft 2” or leverage generative AI technology. Despite being 15 years old, Minecraft shows no signs of slowing down.

For more details on what's coming to the game, check out everything announced at Minecraft Live 2025.