Freshly unveiled at Minecraft Live, a significant graphical update named "Vibrant Visuals" is set to transform the visual landscape of Minecraft. This eagerly anticipated upgrade will first roll out on compatible Minecraft: Bedrock Edition devices, with future plans to extend to Minecraft: Java Edition. Vibrant Visuals introduces enhanced visual features including directional lighting, volumetric fog, pixelated shadows, and shimmering water effects. Importantly, this update is purely cosmetic and will not alter Minecraft’s core gameplay mechanics. For instance, "visual shadows will not impact light levels in a game-mechanics sense, or affect where hostile mobs spawn."
Minecraft Vibrant Visuals Comparison Screenshots
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Players will have the flexibility to switch between the new and classic visual styles with a simple button press, ensuring those who prefer the traditional look can easily maintain it.
Agnes Larsson, Minecraft Vanilla’s game director, shared that the initial beta release 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.”
Maddie Psenka, senior product manager on Vibrant Visuals, elaborated on the journey towards this visual overhaul: “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 continued, emphasizing the cross-platform approach: “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 marks the beginning of an ongoing graphical evolution for Minecraft, aiming to blend the classic aesthetic with modern game visuals over the coming years. Jasper Boerstra, Minecraft’s art director, expressed optimism about future enhancements: “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 will be a free update for Minecraft, reflecting Mojang's commitment to enhancing the game without resorting to heavy monetization. This approach aligns with their philosophy of expanding the original game rather than creating a “Minecraft 2” or utilizing 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.
