What is Minecraft Vibrant Visuals upgrade? Mojang announces vanilla shaders

2025 will be remembered as an important year for Minecraft as the developers finally announced a graphics upgrade feature that will soon make it to the game. The game has been out for over 15 years and despite getting hundreds of updates and new features, its visuals have remained more or less the same. The Vibrant Visuals upgrade will be changing that.

This article will explain everything you need to know about the Vanilla shaders announced in the Minecraft Live event, including whether your computer or device would be able to run it or not.

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All you need to know about Minecraft Vibrant Visuals upgrade

The lighting and reflections are greatly improved (Image via Mojang Studios)

Besides being a complete visual overhaul directly coming from the developers, the other reason that makes the Vibrant Visuals upgrade so monumental is the attention to detail and the improvement it brings to the graphics. It is not just an improved texture pack as the developers took their time to literally change the game.

The upgrade adds or improves multiple elements of the game such as volumetric fog, directional lighting, reflections, subsurface scattering, dynamic range, etc.

The water looks much more realistic (Image via Mojang Studios)

The most notable improvement is for the water texture. Instead of looking like a blue overlay, the water reflects light more naturally and the texture of the waves can be seen properly. In other words, water in Minecraft looks like water. Volumetric light will make the interaction of different items with light more realistic, adding shadows and reflections.

One example, as seen in the image, is you can see the reflection of the sun on shiny surfaces like ice. What makes this better than mods, apart from being Vanilla, is that the developers have ensured that every block in the game retains the original look of Minecraft.

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Better gameplay

Shiny surfaces will reflect the sun in Minecraft (Image via Mojang Studios)

Coming to the mobs, the lighting and visual improvements can also be noticed in how the hostile and non-hostile creatures of the blocky world look. Spiders will have a glow in their eyes, and other mobs such as the warden will look much better with better lighting effects. Every biome will have an improved look, especially those with lots of ambient lighting such as the deep dark, the nether, etc.

Another great aspect of this update is that it's backward compatible. This means you can play multiplayer games in Realms with the visuals turned on or off with other players.

Currently, the developers will only release it for the Bedrock Edition. No dates have been given for the release date, but you can expect a beta and preview version in the coming months. The developers intend to test the features on multiple devices and then release the upgrade for the Java Edition.