Exciting news for Minecraft fans was unveiled at Minecraft Live: a major graphical update named "Vibrant Visuals" is on the horizon. This upcoming enhancement will first roll out to compatible Minecraft: Bedrock Edition devices, with future plans to extend it to Minecraft: Java Edition. The update promises a visual feast with features like directional lighting, volumetric fog, pixelated shadows, and shimmering water. Importantly, these changes are purely cosmetic and won't affect Minecraft's core gameplay mechanics. For instance, the new visual shadows won't alter light levels or influence where hostile mobs spawn.

Minecraft Vibrant Visuals Comparison Screenshots

10 ImagesPlayers can easily switch between the new and classic visuals with a simple button press, ensuring everyone can enjoy their preferred aesthetic.

Agnes Larsson, Minecraft Vanilla’s game director, shared that the first release for beta platforms is just a few months away. “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,” she said.

Maddie Psenka, senior product manager for Vibrant Visuals, elaborated on the project's development: “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 added, “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 is a free update set to enhance Minecraft in the near future, reflecting Mojang's commitment to improving the game without heavy monetization. This approach aligns with their decision to avoid 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 what's coming to the game, be sure to check out everything announced at Minecraft Live 2025.