After spending 15 years playing Minecraft, I just can’t get into modding anymore.
Not only is it just super cumbersome to mod Minecraft in the first place, but if mods aren’t kept up the entire world you’re playing in just BREAKS.
I dunno about the rest of you, but I like going back to my old worlds from time to time and even incorporating the stuff I made in my forever world.
Having mods constantly breaking, or worlds unable to load because vanilla Minecraft won’t recognize it is just too much of a hassle for me. ESPECIALLY when Mojang has been doing these much more frequent update drops instead of the larger once a year update.
Stuff just breaks way too quickly now, it’s not worth trying to maintain it all.
And as a result I’ve become much more focused on ensuring that vanilla worlds maintain instead. Updating redstone or adding new mechanics as they are developed is a much more rewarding use of my time than trying to dig through data files to diagnose why some mod isn’t working anymore.
I wonder, am I alone in this mindset? I feel like people still mod Minecraft quite a lot these days despite all the negative drawbacks to it.
requirements are basic, vanilla/minimal modding, keepinventory on, and a peaceful, respectful attitude both during gaming and when chatting. Aside from that, anything goes.
I have bedrock and java, so a server, realm, or even just friends to play with would be great!
Back for 2025! with some big changes and additions with the newest iteration of my "Vanilla" experience. These are the mods and resource packs that I use when I want clean, Vanilla gameplay👇
Below I'll go through the mods, shaders and resource packs that I use, by category, highlighting the most important ones. The jury is out on whether all of these are truly vanilla in spirit, but I'll leave that up to you.
Mods
If you're a Modrinth user, you can find almost all of these mods (bar BetterF3, Cupboard, Vanilla tweaks and the hacks) in my collection, but each resource I mention will have a link so you can find it.
Note: Mods that are marked with an ❌ aren't updated to 1.21.5 yet, but once they are I will reinstall them, so I thought they'd be worth including.
Mod Loader - Fabric
To start with - I'm a tried and true Fabric loyalist- all of these mods are for Fabric, and I have no idea if you can get them for Forge. I have two mods to support Fabric:
Fabric API - API for Fabric
Fabric Language Kotlin - This allows Fabric mods to use the Kotlin programming language (at this moment, only Zoomify (see below) requires this)
Cosmetic
These are the most exciting ones, the mods that change the look of the game.
AppleSkin - This adds extra UI details around food, like saturation visualisers, regen visualisers and tooltips for food items.
BetterF3 - This mod improves the F3 menu, allowing you to customise it extensively, colour-coding and organising modules.
Chat Heads - This adds player head icons in chat, which is fun.
Image from Chat Heads Modrinth page.
Continuity - This allows for and includes a datapack that adds connected textures.
Distant Horizons - This is probably the coolest mod on this list. Distant Horizons "adds simplified terrain past Minecraft's default view distance to improve performance and allow for longer draw distances." This means you can increase your render distance wayyyy more with way less impact on your machine. It's compatible with a lot of shaders, and it just looks amazing.
Lamb Dynamic Lights - One of many mods that re-add Optifine features, this mod adds dynamic lighting for items and entities that didn't already emit light. Essential for caving!
Iris Shaders - This is an essential, classic open-source shader mod that's more customisable than Optifine. See the shaders I use below.
MiniHUD - Adds a small customisable heads up display in the corner of the screen- I like to have my cardinal direction, fps and coords for quick reference. Love this mod.
OrthoCamera - Adds a third person view with an orthographic perspective to the game. I use this ALL the time when planning big builds, and it makes for some really cool screenshots.
Shulker Box Tooltip - This allows you to see the contents of your Shulker Box through a tooltip in your inventory.
Visuality - This mod adds plenty of vanilla feeling particles to the game.
GIF from Visuality Modrinth page.
Zoomify - This is my favourite zoom mod, it zooms really far and its pretty customisable.
Experience
These are the mods that make the gameplay experience just a little bit nicer.
Ambient Sounds - This adds extra ambience to the world, like bird sounds, the wind, the ocean, night sounds- it's subtle, but is genuinely incredibly immersive.
Debugify - This mod fixes over 70 bugs listed in the Minecraft bug tracker.
FastQuit - This allows the you to quit your world instantly, while it saves in the background. A nice time saver.
Mod Menu - This is an extremely useful mod that adds a menu to see and configure mods while in-game.
Image from Mod Menu Modrinth page.
Sound Physics Remastered - This mod provides realistic sound attenuation, reverberation, and absorption through blocks. This includes echoing in caves which is very fun.
Performance
These mods improve the horrible performance of the base game. I'm not a programmer so I really can't explain them, but they work pretty well for me. I think.
Sodium - This is your basic optimisation mod. If you only use one of these mods, use this one.
Reese's Sodium Options - This adds a better video settings menu to customise Sodium options.
Image from Reese's Sodium Options Modrinth page.
Better Beds - This fixes bed rendering performance by removing the block entity renderer and replaces it with the default Minecraft model entity renderer.
Bobby - This allows the game to render pre-loaded chunks beyond server render distance cap.
Dynamic FPS - This allows FPS to drop as low as you'd like when the game is running in the background.
Entity Culling - This incorporates smarter entity culling.
FerriteCore - This reduces memory usage.
Hold That Chunk - This incorporates smarter chunk loading by loading and unloading chunks by distance from the player, rather than by chunk unload packets from the server, which can be inefficient on high traffic servers.
ImmediatelyFast - This incorporates better rendering.
Krypton - Optimises the networking stack.
Lithium - This is a general optimiser.
❌ ModernFix - Improves performance and fixes bugs.
More Culling - Improves culling all round.
Noisium - This speeds up world generation.
Particle Rain - This improves the look of weather with updated particle effects.
Libraries and APIs
Cloth Config API - A config screen API.
MaLiLib - Library mod.
YetAnotherConfigLib (YACL) - A config library (required by Zoomify and Particle Rain)
Shaders
I'm very fussy with shaders, and most of the time I don't use any, but when I do I go for these three.
Note: all of these require Iris to function (see above).
BSL Shaders
Complimentary Shaders Reimagined
Complimentary Shaders Unbound - Similar to CSRI
Resource Packs
Vanilla Tweaks - This is a resource pack designer that allows you to pick and choose from a variety of tweaks to the visuals and sounds of the game, in part developed by xisumavoid. Here's every tweak I've chosen:
GUI - No Panorama Overlay, Coloured Ping Overlay, Clearer Wither Hearts, Numbered Hotbar, Dark UI
Terrain - Lower Mycelium, Lower Grass Paths, Lower Crimson Nylium, Lower Snow, Lower Podzol, Lower Warped Nylium, Darker Dark Oak Leaves, Golden Savanna, Circular Sun and Moon, Twinkling Stars, Circular Log Tops, Shorter Tall Grass, Shorter Short Grass, Lower Grass
Aesthetic - Cherry Picking, Vertical Nuggets, Brown Leather, Red Iron Golem Flowers, Animated Campfire Items, Moss Carpet Overhang
Dark UI and numbered hotbar
Classic Minecraft Logo
Lower Fire
Visual Note Block Pitch
Bare Bones - This is a texture pack that (when used with the right BSL settings) makes the game look like the Minecraft update trailers. I only use this occasionally, but it does look really great.
Bare Bones - Better Leaves - Improves the leaves with Bare Bones.
Bare Bones Boys
The End
And that's it! All of these are very subject to change, and I'll probably add and remove a lot of these in the future, but those are the mods I'm playing with right now, and I'm quite happy with them. See you in a year when I have to update all of these haha.
can someone recommend me newish smallish minecraft survival servers that arent pay to win, close to vanilla ( i can handle some mods ), crossplay and LGBTQ+ friendly?
