Hello, everyone! We at Team Visionary hope that you’ve had a great week.

If you’re a Minecraft player, you’ve at one point tried a resource pack… and if you haven’t, you’re really missing out on what the game has to offer! After all, Minecraft’s default textures are charming, and some of the new item textures especially have certainly hit the upper limits of pixel art, in a great way. Still, after years — over a decade, for some of us — of looking at the same pixels arranged in the same way, it can get kind of old. 

However, at some point, even the prettiest of resource packs can get old. At that point, we highly recommend getting some shaders — if you need some help getting started and deciding which of the vast amount of shaders out there to use, you can check out our Best Minecraft Shaders resource right here! 

What happens, then, when even shaders start looking like old news? Well, that’s why we’ve made this collection of awesome Visual Improvement and Aesthetic Minecraft Mods to help your game look so much greater. From aesthetic and visual touch ups to existing biomes, to completely new models and animations, this collection is guaranteed to transform your game into something so unbelievably new and different that you won’t believe that it’s still Minecraft! 

If you’re looking for something more specific, do check out our “Best Of” section on our blog, where we group resource pack recommendations (among other things!) by categories and themes — from cute to stylistic to high-performance packs, we’re sure to have something for every kind of Minecraft player!

Better Animation Collection by Fuzs_

Better Animations is a client – side mod creator with the simple but admirable goal of improving the vanilla Minecraft animations, which are arguably… pretty stiff and blocky, let’s be real. Despite being incredibly lightweight and simple, Better Animations’ slight changes and subtle effects are immediately noticeable and really bring your game to life. 

It achieves this by making slight changes to the in – game models of most entities, as well as updating the animations and looks of these models. You’ll see stuff moving and bending that previously didn’t, which gives your Minecraft world a much, much more realistic feeling. The mod even enhances the movement of models in the game by simulating new physics and rules that weren’t there before. 

So far, this mod adds in a sizable twenty – one model changes into the game — which might seem pretty scarce when you take into consideration other mods that add thousands of new items and entities… but again, you do have to take into account that this mod also adds some hefty animation changes, all while remaining a lightweight mod that even budget computers and devices can run smoothly. Most of the model changes are for each individual mob in the game, and even including a brand new spanking model for the player! 

One prime example of a mob animation enhancement is the ghast’s complete overhaul. This mob now has wiggly ghast tentacles, where the mod divides the ghast tentacles into multiple segments and makes them wiggle realistically. You might also notice smaller quality of life changes that really add up, such as that chickens now open and close their beaks when they cluck. Their bills are also a lot more slim, and these fowl now move their heads back and forth as they strut around, just like real chickens do! 

As you might be able to see now, these updates are all subtle and small but really manage to give the game a new feeling that it didn’t have before. It adds a ton more life to the game by making everything just a little bit more realistic for the player, as well as adding in better movement where movement should be, making things look more fluffy if they are supposed to be more fluffy in real life, and giving animals the correct movements that they were lacking before.

As mentioned before, mod not only adds in better, enhanced animations for the mobs and animals around your Minecraft world, but also some for you — the player! You’ll immediately be able to see the positive changes the minute you start trying to eat food or drink from a bottle. row in a boat, ride on a horse, or even inspect some usable items such as a clock or compass. In all, this lightweight but comprehensive mod is a must – have if you care about making your Minecraft game look pretty, realistic and dynamic! 

Download Better Animation Collection

Physics Mod by haubna

If you’ve played Minecraft for even a moment, you’re probably sure to have noticed that Minecraft, as many video games go, doesn’t really follow any sort of physics system. Gravity doesn’t work on blocks aside from sand and gravel, half – chopped trees float around in forests, items float up and down vertically after they’ve been dropped onto the ground, and players can fall from above the clouds into the shallowest pools of water and suffer no damage whatsoever. 

Of course, long – time Minecraft or even video game players won’t be fazed by these physics anomalies; they’re pretty standard for video games across the board. However, with this mod, everything is going to change, and your Minecraft world will become subject to the consequences of physics! 

When items are dropped on the ground in Minecraft, they normally sit straight up and just float, but this is… certainly not what items should do when they’re dropped on the floor in real life! If we’re going with more realistic physics, the items should hit the ground and lay flat on their side before they are either picked up or they despawn. With the Physics mod, that’s exactly what happens; every item will now follow that exact rule and act the same. Blocks, items and entities dropped on the ground will even appear as more of a three dimensional item, coming off of the ground a little bit. 

Floating blocks are also certainly a thing in the game, either from player building, breaking of blocks or even just the natural world generation. With this mod, you’re sure to never see another floating block in your life again. Blocks are affected by gravity and if you do not support them enough, everything might just come crashing down. So be careful when you are mining blocks, especially in a cave! After all, if you mine an important block that’s supporting the entire cave, tons and tons of stone might come crashing down on you.

Another thing added into the game by the mod is block destruction animations. This means if you mine a block, particles of that block will be left in its place, making it actually feel like you mined the block and had to go through the work of breaking it apart — when it’s a solid block such as stone — or spreading it around — in the case of softer blocks such as sand and dirt.

Download Physics Mod

Mob Dismemberment by ohaiiChun

This is a simple mod that gives new death animations to mobs. When you kill a mob with this mod it will give them different dismemberment animations that are pretty gorey, so if you aren’t one for blood, you might just want to skip over this mod. When you kill a mob, any body parts it has will split off from the rest of the body and blood will come out of it.

Fair warning though, this mod is currently outdated and is only updated to support minecraft game version 1.12.2. It is not currently known if this mod is in the process of being updated or if this is the furthest version it will ever be played on.

Download Mob Dismemberment

Better Biome Blend by FionaTheMortal

This client side forge and fabric mod was created to accelerate the biome color blending algorithm that you see in the game. This allows for larger and better looking biome blending without it taking a toll on performance, meaning you get a better looking game without any cost to performance. Though, if you do wish to change the settings at all, you can do so in the video settings option in-game.

This mod also adds a little bonus by making chunks load faster, this faster loading allows for chunks to load faster reducing the amount of stuttering you might experience. This is just an addition to the overall quality improvement over vanilla visuals. Team Visionary have created an awesome guide detailing 20 of the Rarest things in Minecraft, this guide will blow your mind.

If you are looking to get this mod, some other pluses is that it also works well with optifine and is completely compatible with it. Plus you will be able to edit everything in its config, including the blend radius, so if you want a larger area, then look in the option.txt and increase it.

Download Better Biome Blend

Snow! Real Magic! by Snownee_

This mod is a little different from the other ones we have shown so far. This mod changes how snow works in your minecraft worlds and changes a lot more than just visual updates, but also physical ones regarding snow. The main changes that this mod adds are simple yet very nice and realistic changes. You will now be able to place snow on blocks like fences, walls, and tallgrass. Snow will now have better physics and will fall like sand does, and if that snow touches water, the water will now freeze into ice.

Snow will now accumulate during snow storms, and will have a thinner bounding box like it does in the Bedrock edition.  Some smaller changes added in is that snow will never melt, and snow will now fall on ice. Those changes are disabled by default and can be changed in the config, those the rest of the changes are on by default, they can all be edited in the config. But the most important thing added in by this mod, and I can’t stress that it is the most important, and that is you now have reduced fall damage on snow! 

Download Snow! Real Magic!

Falling Leaves by Cheaterpaul

This is a very simple yet amazing mod. Just like the name Falling Leaves implies, that’s what this mod does, it adds in falling leaves to your Minecraft world. This mod is a client side mod so if you wanted to play with it, you wouldn’t need to add it to your server, you would just need to add it to your client.

This mod adds in falling leaves to each block labeled as a leaf block. This means that if the mods you are playing with labels their trees with this, it will work for them as well. 

While it may not seem like much reading about this mod on a website, the difference it makes is subtle yet amazing. It really is the small things in the game that can make a world of difference and in this case it’s just some falling leaves. It adds so much to just exploring the world and makes it feel new and calming. Pair this mod up with some shader packs and it will truly change how you see your Minecraft world.

This mod is only available for game version 1.16.5 and past versions, you will not be able to use it on any versions newer than that, but you can expect updates in the future that will allow for this.

Better Foliage by octarine_noise

Better Foliage is a simple yet beautiful mod that transforms your minecraft world. It does this by mainly improving how vegetation looks. Not only is this mod client-side only, it also is very compatible with most other visual enhancement mods in the game, mods like Optifine, Shaders Mod, etc. 

This mod does plenty of things to plants, the first thing you will notice is that it adds more leaves on trees, giving the leaf block more rounded edges that make the tree more realistic. You will also see that grass blocks have grass on all of them, this grass is not actually there and is much smaller than grass blocks you might find in your worlds. Octagon shaped logs will now be seen in your world, these logs have more edges to give the log a rounder feeling. Just like the leaf blocks from above, cacti now have more growths on them that give them more plant vibes then they had before. Lily pads will now have beautiful pink flowers on them, and rivers will have more vegetation in them, inside of the cold empty bottoms that they used to be.

There are plenty of other visual changes that I have not mentioned for the overworld and even the nether. If you want to see what else this mod has to offer, head to their curse page or download it and find out yourself. But you need to remember that these changes are only visual and that other players might not see them as you do, and that they aren’t actually there.

Download Better Foliage

Dynamic Trees by derreusveritas

This amazingly cool one of a kind mod changes how you will experience trees in minecraft. A tree will now be a multi-block structure of roots, branches, and leaves, all of which changes and advances over time. These trees have many differences over their vanilla Minecraft trees, and it’s a much better improvement. A seed from this mod plants very similar to normal trees, the only difference is that the seed can plant itself if it is in a suitable spot. After it is planted, the tree will start growing before it grows into a full sized tree and can be mined at its base to collect all of the wood.

This mod adds a lot to the game and its main focus is the changes to trees. Trees will need to grow from a seed and mature over time. This growth is modeled straight from the real world, meaning that at times it can grow in unique and believable ways. The trees will grow around obstacles and each kind of tree has its own growth rate and sizes, and each one is temperature, rainfall, and light dependent. This means you will need the correct locations in order to grow any trees from his mod. If the right conditions are not met, the trees will start to die and rot away, sometimes producing mushrooms where the tree was.

This mod adds in plenty of other stuff such as rooty soil and potions. But the reason it is on this list is because of how the trees look. The way they did them made them look more realistic, while making them act realistic as well. The trees have branches that are not just random pieces of wood among the leaf blocks, instead each branch has its own leaves that just makes each tree look amazing.

If you are looking to add in this mod, just know that normal trees will still function the same as before, but you can opt to plant and use these trees, or you can change the world gen to not allow for vanilla trees to grow. The trees also do not drop things like normal trees, this mod changes how things are collected and how things drop. But with all of these changes, fire will still be able to spread just as fast through them, just like normal. Why not take a look at the Team Visionary Minecraft Marketplace resources, updated with some great new editions.

Download Dynamic Trees

Conclusion

As always, I can’t stress enough that while vanilla Minecraft is what I fell in love with all those years ago, what makes it truly special is the flexibility and mod-ability of the game itself. By all means, enjoy the simple yet charming vanilla textures — they’re lovely! However, if you’re an avid Minecrafter and you haven’t tried out the thousands of community-made graphical enhancements available for the game — resource packs, shaders, beautification mods — then you’re definitely missing out. 

We at Team Visionary hope that this article helps you take your first (or fiftieth) step into the wonderful word of visual mods. After all, it’s a lot easier to enjoy the game amidst realistic animations and models!