Minecraft Bedrock Vibrant Visuals update: Everything you need to know

Ever since Minecraft was released in 2011, its graphics quality has mostly remained unchanged. Though Mojang introduced smooth lighting and shadows, texture fidelity changes, etc., they have not brought major changes to the sandbox's visuals. Recently, however, the developers introduced a major visual upgrade for Minecraft named Vibrant Visuals.

This is everything to know about Vibrant Visuals for Minecraft Bedrock Edition.

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Everything to know about Minecraft Bedrock's Vibrant Visuals upgrade

When was the Vibrant Visuals upgrade announced?

Vibrant Visuals was announced in the first Minecraft Live event of 2025. Jens Bergensten, Mojang's CEO, announced the visual upgrade and talked about all its major features along with Jasper Boerstra, creative lead at the company.

This was the first time Mojang mentioned how they will be bringing a brand new graphical upgrade to Minecraft, which will be baked into the game settings.

Though Mojang stated that Vibrant Visuals will be mainly focused on Bedrock Edition, they added that they were working on bringing the visual upgrade to Java Edition as well.

During the Vibrant Visuals announcement, Mojang did not give a clear release window for its official release. In the live event, they stated that it could take them a few months to officially release the feature in Bedrock Edition.

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What does Vibrant Visuals offer?

Vibrant Visuals bring loads of new lighting, shadows, and reflection upgrades to Minecraft. (Image via Sportskeeda Gaming/Mojang Studios)

Vibrant Visuals is a graphical upgrade that brings loads of changes to Minecraft's lighting engine, block textures, and also adds new graphical technologies.

It brings specular highlights and directional lighting, and shadows to Minecraft. This enables shadows cast by the sun and other artificial light sources. However, the shadows remain pixelated, retaining the vanilla look and feel of the game.

With Vibrant Visuals, blocks will feature an extra layer of textures, which will have a few pixels that will be able to reflect light. This effect will add more depth to each block.

A few blocks and entity textures like spiders, enderman, sculk, glow lichen, etc., will have emissive textures with the visual upgrade. Entity eyes and certain block pixels will be able to glow in the dark.

Another major addition with Vibrant Visuals is the introduction of Screen Space Reflections (SSR). This technology adds beautiful reflections in water bodies, or any water block placed in the Minecraft world. Despite adding reflections to water, Mojang made sure that even the reflections are pixelated so that it gives a vanilla feel.

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How to test Vibrant Visuals in Minecraft Bedrock?

Vibrant Visuals can be activated from the experiments section. (Image via Sportskeeda Gaming/Mojang Studios)

As of now, Mojang has only released Vibrant Visuals as an experimental feature in the latest Minecraft Bedrock Edition beta and preview versions. Here is a short guide on how to get the beta and preview version, and turn on Vibrant Visuals on a world:

1. Open the Minecraft launcher and select the Preview edition.
2. Once the game is launched, head over to the Settings tab.
3. Create a new world or edit an existing world and head to the Experiments tab
4. Turn on the toggle under Graphics to enable Minecraft Vibrant Visuals.
5. Additionally, you can select the Vibrant Visuals Options tab to modify and tweak specific settings and features of the visual upgrade.
6. Once done, launch your world to experience the visual upgrades in Vibrant Visuals.

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