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

Freshly revealed at Minecraft Live, a significant 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, with plans to bring Vibrant Visuals to Minecraft: Java Edition in the future. It includes enhanced visual elements such as directional lighting, volumetric fog, pixelated shadows, and shimmering water. This update is purely visual, making no changes to Minecraft’s gameplay. 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 ImagesPlayers can easily toggle between the new and classic visuals with a simple button press, allowing them to maintain the traditional look if they prefer.

Agnes Larsson, Minecraft Vanilla’s game director, shared that the first release will be in a few months for 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, further detailed the journey: "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 around graphics, but 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."

Psenka continued, "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."

Jasper Boerstra, Minecraft’s art director, added, "As Minecraft continues to evolve, I think we'll find new things to add to the graphics over the years, right? We're always in active development and here to stay for a long time. Minecraft is 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, we might look into even more features."

Vibrant Visuals is a free update coming to Minecraft soon, as Mojang continues to prioritize enhancing the game without heavily monetizing it further. This approach aligns with the studio’s commitment to not creating a "Minecraft 2" or using generative AI technology. Even at 15 years old, Minecraft shows no signs of slowing down.

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