7 best Minecraft mods that add popular fan-requested features

One of the biggest double-edged swords of Minecraft's long development history is that as more and more things are added to the game, the community also comes up with potential ideas for new features. While Mojang can't take all of these recommendations into account, plenty of mods bring some of these requested features to the game.

Seven amazing mods that add features requested by fans can be found detailed below, including just what makes these mods so fun.

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7 of the best Minecraft mods that add highly requested fan features

1) Farmer's Delight

Link: https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/farmers-delight

Farmer's Delight is a mod that greatly expands on Minecraft farming. It includes several new crops, such as rice, cabbage, tomato, and onion. These crops can be combined with vanilla crops to make a plethora of new foods, such as sandwiches, salads, and stews, which add a fun layer of personalization to in-game cooking.

The mod also makes it possible to improve and enhance the farmland the crops are grown in, along with blocks, to make building much easier. This makes Farmer's Delight a great, expansive mod that focuses on farming, an area that many players want to see touched up.

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2) Friends & Foes

Link: https://modrinth.com/mod/friends-and-foes

Friends & Foes by faboslav is one of the best vanilla plus mods available to players. Its goal is simple: flesh out and add in some of the most iconic of the mobs that lost their initial mob votes. Having these unimplemented Minecraft mobs in the main game is something the community has been constantly requesting.

Unfortunately, there's no way to tell if Mojang will ever listen, but at least in the meantime, players can check some of these mobs out via mod. The mobs included in Friends & Foes are the tuff golem, rascal, copper golem, glare, iceologer, moobloom, wildfire, the great hunger, illusioner, and zombie horse, all of which have been greatly expanded on to feel like fully fledged vanilla features.

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3) Better Combat

Link: https://modrinth.com/mod/better-combat

Combat is one of the game's aspects that fans are most desperate for Mojang to revamp. Ever since Java's 1.9 update, PvP hasn't been seen as particularly fun or exciting, which is incredibly ironic since the update is called "The Combat Update." This is especially frustrating, as spin-off titles like Dungeons have much more fleshed-out combat.

Thankfully, though, the Better Combat mod by ZsoltMolnarrr fixes this issue by bringing Dungeons combat to the vanilla game.

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4) Geophilic

An improved birch forest created by Geophilic (Image via Mojang)

Link: https://modrinth.com/datapack/geophilic

One of the things that fans of Mojang's blocky masterpiece are almost constantly requesting is a revamp and update of the game's existing biomes. The Geophilic mod by bebebea_loste aims to do just this. The main inspiration for the mod is the concept art of changes that were intended to be in The Wild Update but were removed and are thus very vanilla-friendly.

The mod does things like add more Minecraft flowers to biomes, as well as fallen trees, tree stumps, bushes, and even entirely new tree types. This makes the different base biomes much more interesting and exciting to explore.

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5) Earth Mobs

A regular rabbit vs an Earth Mobs jumbo rabbit (Image via Mojang)

Link: https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/earth-mobs

The Earth Mobs mod created by bagu_chan500 adds several mobs from the now-defunct Minecraft Earth mobile spin-off game. Fans on social media have often requested to see some of these exclusive mobs added to the base game, especially as all of these spin-offs have now been discontinued. There are so many interesting ideas that Mojang seems desperate to leave forgotten to time.

Earth Mobs doesn't add every mob from Earth, as there are dozens of them. However, it does add several fun and iconic ones. For example, the mod adds baby ghasts, jumbo rabbits, skeleton Minecraft wolves, tropical slimes, bone spiders, and moobloom.

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6) Guard Villagers

Armed villagers patrolling a village (Image via Mojang)

Link: https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/guard-villagers

One of the most frustrating aspects of Minecraft villages and villagers is their strict adherence to pacifism. These structures rely exclusively on iron golems to stay safe, which oftentimes goes very poorly as the single mob is spread too thin. This leads to villagers slowly but surely being killed, until no more golems can spawn and the village goes extinct.

As a direct result, players often request armed villagers to help guard these Minecraft structures, as it is incredibly frustrating to come back to a villager trading hall just to see that a rogue hostile mob slipped through the defenses and slaughtered everyone. Guard Villagers brings this to the game in a vanilla-friendly, intuitive, and balanced way, allowing villagers to finally help defend themselves.

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7) Optifine

Optifine is one of the easiest ways to get shader support and better lighting (Image via Mojang)

Link: https://optifine.net/home

Few features have been requested as consistently as an update to the game's lighting engine. For years, players have wanted the ability to light up an area by holding or dropping a torch or other similar light-producing item, as well as improved dynamic lighting in general.

Several mods fix this issue, but the most well-known has to be Minecraft Optifine. This mod, created by sp614x, allows for realistic lighting, adds connected textures, another highly requested feature, and is often used to run shaders for Forge modpacks.