Freshly unveiled at Minecraft Live, a major new graphical update dubbed "Vibrant Visuals" is set to revolutionize the visual experience of Minecraft. This eagerly anticipated upgrade will first roll out on compatible devices running Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, with future plans to extend it to Minecraft: Java Edition. The update brings a suite of enhanced visual features, including directional lighting, volumetric fog, pixelated shadows, and shimmering water effects. Importantly, these enhancements are purely visual 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 and classic visuals with ease, catering to those who wish to retain the traditional Minecraft look.
Agnes Larsson, Minecraft Vanilla’s game director, shared insights on the rollout timeline: “So the first release is actually in a few months time for the beta 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 have 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 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.”
This update marks the beginning of a new era in Minecraft's visual journey, promising ongoing improvements and evolutions over the coming years. Jasper Boerstra, Minecraft’s art director, shared his vision for the future: “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 is a complimentary update set to enhance Minecraft in the near future, reflecting Mojang's commitment to enriching the game without heavy monetization. This approach aligns with their philosophy of expanding 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.
