Minecraft's 'Vibrant Visuals' Upgrade the Start of a New 'Graphical Journey'

Freshly revealed at Minecraft Live, a major new graphical update is on the way to Minecraft, titled "Vibrant Visuals."

This upcoming upgrade will initially be released for compatible Minecraft: Bedrock Edition devices, but there are plans to bring Vibrant Visuals to Minecraft: Java Edition in the future. It includes improved visual elements such as directional lighting, volumetric fog, pixelated shadows, and noticeably shimmering water. Purely a visual enhancement, Vibrant Visuals makes no changes to Minecraft’s gameplay. For example, "visual shadows will not impact light levels in a game-mechanics sense, or affect where hostile mobs spawn."

Players will be able to toggle between the new and previously existing visuals of Minecraft with the simple press of a button, meaning a classic look can be maintained by those who desire it.

“So the first release is actually in a few months time for the beta platforms”, Agnes Larsson, Minecraft Vanilla’s game director, said.

“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 towards Minecraft’s new look was further detailed by Maddie Psenka, senior product manager 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 just the start of a new graphical journey for Minecraft, one that will improve and evolve over the next several years as the team at Mojang balance that classic Minecraft aesthetic with wanting to make it look more like a "modern game."

"As Minecraft continues to evolve, I think we'll find new things to add to the graphics over the years, right?” Jasper Boerstra, Minecraft’s art director, said.

“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 update coming to Minecraft in the near future, as Mojang continues to refuse to heavily monetize the best-selling game of all time further. This philosophy of improving and expanding the original game also goes hand-in-hand with the studio’s desire to not make a “Minecraft 2”, or take advantage of generative AI technology. It may be 15 years old now, but there’s truly no sign of Minecraft slowing down.

Simon Cardy is a Senior Editorial Producer who can mainly be found skulking around open world 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.