7 best mods that make vanilla Minecraft better

While Minecraft performs well in its vanilla or unmodified state, it can still be improved with certain quality-of-life additions. While many mods can alter the game, sometimes players want minor tweaks to make the experience enjoyable while still keeping it vanilla.

For the most part, many vanilla-friendly mods make either minute changes to gameplay or add innocuous items and blocks that assist players. This way, the game still feels like Minecraft, and the mods don't tarnish its original experience.

There are too many great vanilla improvement mods to list, but it doesn't hurt to look at some of the best examples seen this year.

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Seven of the best Minecraft Mods to use for Enhancing Vanilla gameplay

1) Waystones

A waystone that can be fast traveled to in Minecraft thanks to the Waystones mod (Image via BlayTheNinth/CurseForge)

While there are many ways to travel, the game still lacks a conclusive method of fast travel like many other open-world titles (unless you count console commands).

Developers seek to amend this issue by adding buildable waystones in-game, which can be placed near points of interest and teleported to using return scrolls and rechargeable teleportation gems.

These waystones don't infringe on the core gameplay but simply provide an easy means to move about your world.

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2) Cosmetic Armor Reworked

Cosmetic Armor Reworked is great for showing off your skin and appearance without all that clunky armor (Image via LainMI/Minecraft Mods)

Armor's incredibly helpful, there are no two ways about it. However, not every player likes the appearance of certain armor pieces or materials. Sometimes, you still want your player skin to show in places (or completely) while still receiving the benefits of armor.

Cosmetic Armor Reworked performs this masterfully by adding a second set of armor slots to the players' UI. This set can be used to display or hide armor while still receiving the benefits of having it equipped.

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3) Jade

Jade allows Minecraft players to gain more insight into any block or entity they're looking at (Image via Snownee_/9Minecraft)

Have you ever looked at a hostile mob and wondered how much health it has left? Perhaps you're curious about which of your chests has the item you've been searching for.

Players can use the Jade mod to receive a helpful in-game tooltip detailing additional information on anything they aim their cursor at. This includes items found in a storage block, the health and armor of a mob, and much more information.

Furthermore, this tooltip can be shown or hidden through easy keyboard shortcuts.

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4) Mob Grinding Utils

Mob Grinding Utils provides new ways to make mob farms in Minecraft (Image via Vadis365/CurseForge)

Farming mobs is a time-honored tradition, and there are many ways to do so. However, some mob farms can be complex and require a lot of material and knowledge to create effectively.

Fortunately, the Mob Grinding Utils mod can greatly improve your mob farming capabilities without breaking the vanilla feel of Minecraft.

Mob Grinding Utils adds simple blocks such as conveyor belts, mob fans, and iron spikes/mob mashers to kill mobs easily, before absorption hoppers intake their experience orbs. All blocks retain a vanilla appearance and shouldn't break your immersion in the slightest.

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5) Entity Culling

Entity Culling can give Minecraft players a helpful performance boost on some machines (Image via tr9zw/9Minecraft)

This mod doesn't exactly alter gameplay. However, it's helpful for those seeing framerate drops or hanging on lower-end machines.

Entity Culling performs a very simple task: It removes mobs and other entities that have been rendered behind you and doesn't render them again until you turn around to face them.

This keeps off-screen entities from loading in, saving your CPU and GPU some work while you're playing and providing an overall boost to performance.

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6) Sodium

Sodium is another excellent mod option for Minecraft players looking for a performance boost (Image via jellysquid3_/CurseForge)

Minecraft's rendering engine has undergone many tweaks and revisions over the years, but Sodium offers an entirely new alternative. This mod replaces the rendering and generation engines offered by Java, while greatly improving framerates and removing stuttering in the process.

Sodium is also compatible with most in-game mods, so you won't need to worry about any crashes or problematic issues.

Sodium can be configured for your specific machine. That said, simply installing and activating it should provide a substantial boost to performance without altering the vanilla game.

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7) JourneyMap

JourneyMap ensures a Minecraft player won't get lost easily (Image via u/Wh0vian/Reddit)

One of the most-downloaded mods in the community today, JourneyMap is an incredibly reliable companion that won't break your immersion.

The mod adds a minimap to your UI that tracks the terrain and your coordinates in real time. You can even open JourneyMap in a web browser and take a look around as well as mark points of interest.

It works on both single-player worlds and multiplayer servers, making it one of the most indispensable aids that players can find in the game.