4 best features offered by Minecraft's Vibrant Visuals so far

Mojang recently released the Vibrant Visuals upgrade to Minecraft Bedrock beta and preview 1.21.80.25 for testing. This feature will first officially drop in Bedrock Edition and then to Java Edition later on. Vibrant Visuals is a major visual overhaul that will soon become Minecraft's default look, which is a massive milestone for the title.

Although this will be Mojang's first attempt at making a shader pack for the game, Vibrant Visuals offers some great features. Some of these components have not yet been implemented by any other popular shader packs. Here's a list of a few great features offered by Vibrant Visuals.

Note: This article is subjective and solely reflects the writer's opinion.

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List of 4 great Vibrant Visual features in Minecraft so far

1) Pixelated shadows

Pixelated shadows look brilliant and true to the vanilla game. (Image via Sportskeeda Gaming/Mojang Studios)

With Vibrant Visuals, Mojang added brand new light and shadow mechanics to Minecraft. Developers have added volumetric and directional lighting, which also resulted in directional shadows. While these shadows can be as sharp as required, Mojang particularly wanted to retain the vanilla visuals of the game; hence, these shadows have been pixelated as well.

This resulted in every single shadow in the game being pixelated, from the player's shadow to solid block shadows. The shadows become pixelated at the edges, which is different from other sharper games where shadows simply blur out or become smoother.

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2) Point lighting

Point lighting will drastically improve Minecraft's overall visuals. (Image via Sportskeeda Gaming/Mojang Studios)

In Minecraft, whenever players place a light source like a torch, lantern, or candle, the block emits light. However, the light source itself was not too bright and never had directional or volumetric effects. With Vibrant Visuals, Mojang added a new lighting mechanic called point light.

Point light was a new light system that came with directional and volumetric effects. When players place a torch with Vibrant Visuals on, the light block will have a new light source that will cast real-time shadows and bounce off solid objects in a brand new manner.

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3) Pixelated reflections

Vibrant Visuals offers pixelated reflections, unlike any other shader pack. (Image via Sportskeeda Gaming/Mojang Studios)

In the base graphics, neither the blocks nor the water reflect any light. There are essentially no reflections in old Minecraft graphics. With Vibrant Visuals, Mojang decided to add reflections to water and a few block textures. Similar to shadows, developers planned to retain the pixelated look of the game while incorporating reflections.

Hence, the original pixelated texture of the water source block is retained, but reflections are added to the liquid. This results in pixelated reflections, where some pixels are reflecting light. This results in somewhat blurry reflections, which are unique and have not been seen in any other shader pack yet.

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4) Light behavior with clouds

The way Mojang coded clouds and how they react to the sun and moonlight is brilliant. (Image via Sportskeeda Gaming/Mojang Studios)

While Mojang still has to work on Vibrant Visuals' lighting mechanics, Minecraft's current lighting engine provides great interactions with the new thin clouds.

When Vibrant Visuals is turned on, the light bouncing on and coming through clouds makes the game a lot prettier than before. The new thin clouds also look great. Though Mojang will continue to make smaller tweaks, the cloud interactions with the sun and moonlight look quite polished and ready for release.

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