Why Minecraft Vibrant Visuals update is bigger deal than you might think

The first Minecraft Live event of 2025 was just held by Mojang, where they announced the new Vibrant Visuals upgrade. Essentially, this will be a visual upgrade that adds shaders to Bedrock Edition. Additionally, Mojang stated they would release the feature to Java Edition at a later date.

Vibrant Visuals will be the first official shader pack made by the game developers themselves. Hence, an argument can be made that this will truly change vanilla Minecraft forever. Here's how.

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

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Ways in which Vibrant Visuals upgrade for Minecraft will be a massive deal

Bedrock Edition is officially getting shader support from Mojang

Minecraft Bedrock Edition will finally receive shader support and an official shader pack by the developers themselves (Image via Mojang Studios)

Soon after Minecraft's release in 2011, the Java Edition started receiving loads of shader packs from the community. On the other hand, because Bedrock Edition was slightly closed in terms of modding, the community could never make decent third-party features for the game.

Though many content creators got a chance to sell their mods and resource packs to the player base with the introduction of Marketplace, shaders were still nowhere to be found. Mojang introduced shader support for Bedrock Edition in 2023, but it remained behind the experimental toggle. This could only be activated in beta/preview versions, so they were never usable in stable builds.

Hence, when Mojang announced Vibrant Visuals for Bedrock Edition and mentioned that it would be released in the coming months, the feature instantly became the biggest addition Minecraft has ever seen in many years.

Bedrock Edition will soon receive its first official shader pack, which is created by Mojang Studios themselves. It will be backward compatible and can also be activated and deactivated locally. Since millions of players will now be experiencing Minecraft with shaders, it will drastically change the game's overall experience.

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The default look of Minecraft will finally change with Vibrant Visuals

The vanilla look of Minecraft will soon change forever. (Image via Sportskeeda Gaming/Mojang Studios)

Minecraft has always looked like it has the most basic graphics and textures. The lighting was never volumetric, there were no water or texture reflections on any block, and the shadows of each entity were a simple dark circle beneath it. Though it received smooth lighting, shadow render distance, and other graphical enhancements, the graphics remained extremely basic.

For more than 16 years, the gaming industry could easily imagine a scene from Minecraft if they were asked to do so — with all these basic graphic details and pixellated textures.

In the next coming months, however, a new leaf will turn as Minecraft will bring Vibrant Visuals. Since this will be their official shader pack in the vanilla version, most players would likely toggle it on and see what it looks like. Even if a player has never even opened the Marketplace or searched for Minecraft mods, they will be able to turn on shaders in the game.

Hence, it is safe to say that the new default look of Minecraft will change with Vibrant Visuals. In the future, there is a strong chance that when new players imagine a scene from Minecraft, they will imagine it with all the visual upgrades offered by Vibrant Visuals.

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