Vibrant Visuals on Java Edition

At Minecraft LIVE, we revealed the first glimpse of an exciting visual refresh: Vibrant Visuals. We also shared that while it’ll come initially to Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, we’re actively working on bringing it to Java Edition, and today we’re going to share more about what the road ahead of us will look like. We’re going to keep you updated every step of the way too – so you’ll be able to follow our journey to bringing Vibrant Visuals to all our Java Edition players! 

What is Vibrant Visuals? 

 Vibrant Visuals is our developers’ vision for what Minecraft looks like with improved visual elements – and the result is dazzling. Shadows move as the sun arcs across the sky, water reflects the landscape around it, and clouds appear infinite as they stretch far into the distance. A lot of care and attention has been taken to preserve what makes Minecraft feel unique. With Vibrant Visuals, every texture you see in-game, from stone to copper, dirt to obsidian, has been considered when it comes to lighting, so light affects each block differently.

Preparing Vibrant Visuals for Java Edition 

Java Edition is where Minecraft began, and now we’re working on rebuilding the code in a way that will not only support visual updates like Vibrant Visuals, but future enhancements, too – without sacrificing stability or performance. Our focus is on the sustainability of Java Edition, and so the first step we’re taking to prepare for Vibrant Visuals on Java is refactoring – which means we’re separating our gameplay code from our rendering code and bringing the latter up to date with more modern approaches to rendering. Undertaking this work on Minecraft: Bedrock Edition has already taught us a lot – and now we can bring those learnings into Minecraft: Java Edition. 

Once this is complete, we’ll implement a modern rendering pipeline that will give us a strong foundation to build upon, making visual changes and performance improvements easier in the future – for us, and modders too!. After that, we will be able to start adding the visual features. We really want to take this time to build this properly for Java Edition and build it in a way that allows us to continue to add complex enhancements such as Vibrant Visuals to Java in the future. 

Our goal is to bring Vibrant Visuals to all Java Edition players, across all supported devices – and we know that is going to be a challenge. We are working on a viable solution that works across the Java platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux and are committed to continuing to support these platforms. 

How we’ll deliver Vibrant Visuals on Java Edition

Rather than saving up our improvements for one big release, we’ll be releasing them as soon as they’re ready – first in snapshots, and then full releases – so players will get to experience them as quickly as possible. That means you’ll see us making changes and implementing improvements in our code (in fact, eagle-eyed players may have noticed that we started laying the groundwork for rewriting our rendering code last year). 

The testing phases will be really important, too – as we anticipate players on less common GPUs and older GPU drivers might experience bugs or crashes. We’ll be working hard to identify and solve any that do arise, and you’ll be able to help us (as you always do) by reporting bugs whenever a new change goes into testing. Our focus throughout is going to be on performance impact and stability. We want to ensure the game runs smoothly – even with Vibrant Visuals – and a lot of the work we’ll be doing will be around assessing the impact Vibrant Visuals has on performance across different Java Edition devices.   

Some of these updates will be small (or even invisible), some of them will be bigger – but we’ll be letting you know whenever there’s something new for you to go in and test! 

How can I help? 

Vibrant Visuals is already in testing for Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, and we’ll be using the feedback from those testing rounds to help us iterate as we work on bringing it to Java. You can help us by giving feedback on Vibrant Visuals, even for Bedrock Edition, as we’ll be taking all of that feedback onboard for the work we’re doing on Java Edition, too. Give us feedback here! 

To try out Vibrant Visuals, all you have to do is enable beta/preview on Bedrock Edition and turn on the “Vibrant Visuals” toggle when creating or editing a new world. You’ll find this toggle in the Experimental tab, which you can reach from both the Create New World or Edit World screens. You can find more detailed instructions for testing features here! 

And don’t forget, if you own Minecraft on Windows PC, you have access to both Java and Bedrock Edition. So even if you’re a regular Java player, you can pop into Bedrock Edition to experience and test the early stages of Vibrant Visuals! 

The first step towards a Vibrant future 

As we said at Minecraft LIVE, we’re committed to crafting a bright (and dare we say, vibrant!) future for Java Edition. We’ll be back with more updates as soon as we have them!