6 best resource packs to aesthetically enhance Minecraft

Even after 15 years, Mojang has stuck to Minecraft's traditional appearance. The studio hasn't officially increased the texture fidelity or brought any new lighting and shadow models to the game. Only the textures of blocks, items, and mobs were changed, but the overall pixel density were kept intact. Mojang also kept most old mob and player animations even though despite introducing new mobs with much-improved animations.

Thankfully, the community has been hard at work in creating third-party features for the game over the past 15 years. They have released some great resource packs that massively increase the visual fidelity and quality of the game. Here is a list of some great resource packs that visually enhance Minecraft.

Note: This article is subjective and solely reflects the writer's opinion. All the resource packs mentioned below are compatible with the latest 1.21.4 version.

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6 great resource packs to uplift Minecraft's aesthetics

1) Pixlli x128

Pixlli is one of the best high-resolution texture packs for Minecraft (Image via Mojang Studios)

Pixlli is a relatively new resource pack that massively increases the texture fidelity of Minecraft blocks that are placed in the world. The resource packs essentially add PBR (Physically Based Rendering), and POM (Parallax Occlusion Map) textures that add depth to each pixel on a block. The picture clearly depicts how each pixel on a dirt block looks like they have depth.

Pixlli also increases the overall pixel count on each block face from 16x16 to 128x128 in the free version. Although the 16x16 pixel layout is intact, the details within each base pixel are much more. This lets the pack retain the game's vanilla feel while still improving fidelity.

The resource pack developer also offers x256 and x512 quality resource packs that are behind a paywall. However, even the free version which was used to take the screenshot above, will look brilliant in the game.

2) Bare Bones

Bare Bones further simplifies the textures of blocks, items, and mobs (Image via Mojang Studios)

A complete opposite to Pixlli is the Bare Bones resource pack. While keeping the same 16x16 texture, this pack further simplifies the base Minecraft textures. It particularly decreases the difference in color shades used to add depth and detail to any texture. Hence, the brown part of a dirt block will simply have one tone of brown.

On top of changing all the blocks, the Bare Bones pack changes mob and item textures, giving the game a completely different look.

If players have seen Mojang's official trailers to introduce or release updates, they will notice that the trailers used a certain art style that has flatter textures compared to the base game. The Bare Bones texture pack aims to bring that into the game itself.

3) Fresh Animations

Fresh Animations add new mob animations and model movement to Minecraft (Image via Mojang Studios)

Fresh Animation is an extremely popular resource pack that adds completely new mob animations to the game. Most mobs in Minecraft, especially older ones, have an extremely basic set of animations. They can either move their necks horizontally or vertically, move their legs without their knees bending, and not move any part of their face, including their eyes.

All these points are targeted by Fresh Animations to make mobs in Minecraft a lot more interesting. In the picture above, players can see how each villager can move their eyes and even eyebrows around. Similarly, every single mob has updated animations using this resource pack.

4) Detailed Animations

Detailed Animation adds interesting movements to the player's character (Image via Mojang Studios)

After sorting out mob animations using Fresh Animations, players can turn to their own in-game character and add new animations using the Detailed Animation resource pack. It adds much smoother character movements, making them look a lot livelier than before.

Characters have different jumping, sneaking, swimming, and fighting animations with this pack. This will massively enhance the gaming experience in multiplayer worlds where players can see others move in a new manner.

5) Motschen's Better Leaves

This pack adds extra layers of leaf particles to make leaf blocks more realistic (Image via Mojang Studios)

Motschen's Better Leaves is another famous resource pack that basically makes trees look much more realistic. Since leaf blocks are complete cubes in Minecraft, they look vastly unrealistic. Hence, this pack adds extra leaf particles to them so that they do not look like clear-cut blocks. These leaf particles are not blocks, so entities can walk or pass through them.

When looking at the scenery, this pack makes trees a lot more realistic and visually appealing.

6) Borderless Glass

Borderless glass simply removes borders from glass blocks and panes (Image via Mojang Studios)

Borderless Glass is a simple yet effective resource pack that simply removes the border texture from every glass block in the game, either regular, stained, or tinted. Hence, when players place glass blocks adjacent to one another, the blocks will seamlessly connect with one another. This can massively improve any build's visual quality.

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Edited by Angad Sharma