"Minecraft Unveils 'Vibrant Visuals' Upgrade, Begins New Graphical Journey"

Announced at Minecraft Live, a significant new graphical update, "Vibrant Visuals," is set to enhance the visual experience of Minecraft. Initially launching on compatible Minecraft: Bedrock Edition devices, with plans to expand to Minecraft: Java Edition, this update introduces a range of visual improvements including directional lighting, volumetric fog, pixelated shadows, and shimmering water effects. Importantly, Vibrant Visuals is a purely visual upgrade and does not alter the core gameplay mechanics, such as light levels or mob spawning.

Minecraft Vibrant Visuals Comparison Screenshots

10 ImagesPlayers will have the option to easily switch between the new and classic visual styles with a single button press, ensuring that those who prefer the original look can maintain it.

Agnes Larsson, Minecraft Vanilla’s game director, shared that the first beta release is expected in a few months. She emphasized the importance of ensuring high quality and good performance across multiple 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: "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 highlighted the team's commitment to ensuring compatibility across various 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."

This update marks the beginning of a new graphical journey for Minecraft, one that will continue to evolve over the coming years. Jasper Boerstra, Minecraft’s art director, expressed enthusiasm 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, reflecting Mojang's ongoing commitment to enhancing the game without heavily monetizing it. This approach aligns with their philosophy of expanding the original game rather than creating a "Minecraft 2" or leveraging generative AI technology. Even after 15 years, Minecraft shows no signs of slowing down.

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