At Minecraft Live, the developers unveiled an exciting new graphical update for Minecraft, aptly named "Vibrant Visuals." This upcoming enhancement will first be available on devices compatible with Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, with future plans to extend it to Minecraft: Java Edition. Vibrant Visuals introduces a range of visual improvements, including directional lighting, volumetric fog, pixelated shadows, and shimmering water effects. Importantly, these changes are purely aesthetic and do not alter the core gameplay mechanics of Minecraft. 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

10 Images

Players will have the flexibility to switch between the new visuals and the classic look with a simple button press, allowing them to choose their preferred aesthetic.

Agnes Larsson, Minecraft Vanilla’s game director, shared that the initial beta release of Vibrant Visuals is set for a few months from now. She emphasized the importance of ensuring high quality and good performance across various platforms: “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 development process, highlighting the team's commitment to building a solid foundation for 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 also stressed the importance of ensuring compatibility across different platforms: “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.”

Vibrant Visuals marks the beginning of a new graphical journey for Minecraft, one that aims to blend the game's classic aesthetic with modern visual enhancements over the coming years. Jasper Boerstra, Minecraft’s art director, shared insights into the ongoing development: “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 is a free update slated for release in the near future, reflecting Mojang's commitment to enhancing the game without heavy monetization. This approach aligns with the studio's philosophy of continually improving the original game rather than creating a "Minecraft 2" or leveraging generative AI technology. Despite being 15 years old, Minecraft shows no signs of slowing down.

For more details on upcoming features, be sure to check out everything announced at Minecraft Live 2025.