New Vibrant Visuals upgrade might affect Minecraft's modding landscape

Mojang recently hosted the first Minecraft Live event of 2025, in which they announced the new Vibrant Visuals upgrade for the game. This is essentially a graphical enhancement for the Bedrock Edition in the coming months. Mojang also mentioned that it will come to the Java Edition after Bedrock.

This is a massive deal since Vibrant Visuals will finally be bringing shader support to Bedrock. However, an argument can be made that this visual enhancement might affect the modding community in several ways. Read on to learn more.

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

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How Vibrant Visuals might affect Minecraft Bedrock and Java shader pack space

Vibrant Visuals might affect community-made shader packs for Bedrock Edition

Vibrant Visuals could make community-built shader packs less popular (Image via CurseForge/Al3xis5 || Mojang Studios)

Shader support for Minecraft Bedrock Edition has been in the game for a long time, but it was only available under the experimental section. Many modders in the community started making more visually appealing shader packs after it was released for beta/preview Bedrock versions in 2023.

Despite being an RTX-exclusive feature confined to the experimental section, the community-made shader packs were massively popular. Players would get wind of these from creators before trying them out in the game.

Fast forward to 2025, and Mojang has now announced the Vibrant Visuals upgrade for Bedrock Edition. With its arrival, it is safe to say that community-made shader packs will become less popular.

One of the main reasons is that Vibrant Visuals will be a baked-in feature in the game. This means that it will update with each game drop and major patch. Hence, players will not be required to download any additional files or face version disparity issues. This will make Vibrant Visuals an easy shader pack to use.

Though this is massive news for the general public, it might affect the community that makes shader packs for the Bedrock Edition.

Since a lot of Bedrock Edition players haven't experienced shaders as of yet, they will switch to Vibrant Visuals when it comes out and completely skip the community-made shader packs.

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Vibrant Visuals will give tough competition to Java Edition shader packs

Vibrant Visuals will also affect Java Edition shader packs (Image via Sportskeeda Gaming/Mojang Studios)

Although Vibrant Visuals's effect will be most evident in the Bedrock Edition, it will also affect the Java Edition. Minecraft's Java Edition is known for its mod, resource pack, and shader support. The game can be heavily modded, and countless shader packs have been released for it, offering all kinds of visual experiences. In fact, one can safely say that the shader pack community is a lot stronger and more established in the Java Edition.

However, despite its strength, Vibrant Visuals should give tough competition to Java Edition shaders. This is particularly because of how easily Vibrant Visuals can be implemented into the game. Once Mojang releases the visual upgrade to the Java Edition, players can directly open the vanilla version and enjoy the official shader pack without having to download additional files.

Even though the Java Edition is popular for its mod support, there are still millions who play the vanilla version. Vibrant Visuals might become the only shader pack they use since such players will likely not want to mess around with unofficial mod files.

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