Top 20 Minecraft Mods

xKazlsKoolx

Ever wondered what Minecraft would have looked like if it released way back in the 90s on the PlayStation One? MCSX answers that question, giving Minecraft a complete, retro overhaul, to give you that old-school feeling. It does this by weakening features like the render distance, fog, and item models, all on top of alpha graphics and sound effects, to provide the crispy CRT aesthetic the 90s was known for. Additionally, it gives the game a horror spin, adding a plethora of harrowing events that could kick off at any time. We won’t spoil what they are, you’ll have to hunt these terrors yourself!

Chaosyr

Ever tried hunting a specific biome, whether that’s a new location to settle, or you’re on a woodland mansion hunt, with treasure on your mind? In the vanilla game, you have nothing to guide you, and you must wander the world aimlessly. Well, Nature’s Compass solves this, by adding a compass that can tell you the nearest type of any biome. Want to go one step further, and find structures too? You can pair this with Explorer’s Compass by the same author, which now lets you hunt any structure in the game! These are a mighty combo, which make the worlds we’ve been exploring for years ever so slightly more fun to uncover.

daedelus_dev

Vanilla combat has always been one of the game’s weaker aspects. Sure, there was a combat update in 2016, which added much-needed improvements, like shields and dual wielding. It’s still far from the best. But if you want to fix it, then this mod is for you. ‘Better Combat’ does exactly what it says on the tin: it adds a whole bunch of combat fixes, like various attack animations, better collision detection, and combos for certain weapons. You can even wield two-handed weapons, making it feel like you’re the protagonist of a Souls Game, except with more creepers.

Henkelmax / Vlad2305m / Sonic Ether


Exploring caves has always been the heart and soul of “Minecraft,” especially since the ‘Cave & Cliffs’ update completely revitalized underground exploration. Well, now you can make it even more immersive, with this incredible sound overhaul. It doesn’t change the sounds themselves, but instead adds reverberation, attenuation, and absorption through blocks. So, now you can hear amazing echoes as you explore the depths, bringing a whole new level of detail to the game, which we never knew was needed. It’s also compatible with Simple Voice Chat, a proximity voice chat mod, so exploring caves with friends will have you on the edge of your seat!

Tr7zw

Third person isn’t great in vanilla. With a lack of animations, your character barely comes to life. For instance, when rowing a boat, their arms don’t move at all, making you think there’s a secret engine hidden in the wooden rafts. Not Enough Animations corrects all these issues. What it adds feels small, but it improves the game so much! Animations it fixes are eating and drinking, holding a map, rowing a boat, riding a horse, holding a compass, climbing a ladder, and many others! Really, Mojang should add these to the base game. But until then, this is an essential download.

Xaero96

The original map system leaves a lot to be desired, requiring you to explore everything to reveal each map. It also only maps a small area each time, so you’re going to have to fill your inventory with them to get around. Thankfully, there are plenty of minimap mods available, but Xaero’s is easily the best. Other than adding a highly useful minimap, it also adds a map of your entire game world. More useful features include waypoints, displaying nearby items and mobs, and fast travel. If you and your friends have a huge world, this makes getting around it much more manageable.

terrariumearth

Interior decoration is an uphill battle in vanilla. With a lack of decorative blocks available, you’re forced to adapt, cobbling together stairs, signs, and trapdoors to make a dining table. Handcrafted gives you the opposite problem, giving you so many things to decorate your home, you can spend hours improving a single room! It adds more than 250 furniture pieces, including tables, chairs, and benches, most feeling crucial for a home. Now you can spend hours micromanaging your base’s interior, giving you a truly stylish abode to come home to.

MoriyaShiine

Magic mods are incredibly tough to pull off, with most eventually giving you way too much power, and ruining the game’s charm. Bewitchment manages to avoid this issue, focusing on the spooky side of magic. With this mod, you can turn yourself into a vampire or werewolf, giving you loads of exciting new powers! You can also curse your enemies, teaching them a lesson when you’ve been griefed. Ghosts also come with the mod, and a whole bunch of rituals to be performed. Potions have been improved too, and there are also flying brooms, so you can live out your grandest witch fantasies.

Starmute

When it comes to the vanilla game’s Nether experiences, you tend to run in, get what you need, and then zoom back out again. The vanilla Nether gives you little incentive to do otherwise. But Incendium completely overhauls the dimension, and does a much better job than Mojang did with their Nether update. It adds 8 new biomes for way more variety, such as the Withered Forest and Quartz Flats. There are also more than 9 new structures to explore, like the Forbidden Castle and the Sanctum. It comes with more loot and items too, and even more mobs. Now, the Nether is better than ever!

sk89q

Ever wanted to expand your base, but don’t have the hours to spend landscaping, filling chests up with dirt from flattening huge tracts of land? We play “Minecraft” to have fun, and for many of us, this just isn’t enjoyable. Thankfully, WorldEdit is here to save the day, making the most tedious aspects of building a breeze. This mod’s uses are endless, making flattening a mountain only one command away! You can convert math equations into blocks, copy and paste structures, or even hollow out a new river or ocean. This is a mod you can spend years learning, and should be an early addition to every mod list.

Collaborative open-source

Shaders used to be a dream in Minecraft’s infancy, usually tanking performance with not much you could do to fix it. Well, thanks to Iris, the best shaders are only a few clicks away, and you don’t need a high-end gaming PC to run them! It’s an open-source mod that significantly improves shader performance. On its own, you won’t see much difference, but after setting up a shader, the improvement is profound. A few shaders we can recommend are Complementary Reimagined, Nostalgia, and Beyond Belief, but there are so many to choose from that you can spend hours trying them out. If it weren’t for Iris, shaders wouldn’t be experiencing such a golden age.

Various Authors

Our next entry is for all the “Pokémon” fans out there, who just gotta catch ‘em all. Not only does Pixelmon add a whole bunch of Pokémon to your world, but it also adds battling, trading, and breeding. Currently, it has almost a thousand Pokémon across all nine generations. That’s nearly every Pokémon ever designed! It will take you a long time to capture every single one, but this is a must-have for Pokémon fans. It doesn’t use the random encounter feature, but instead makes them spawn all over the world, adding so much variety to nature, and a whole new element to exploration.

James_Seibel

This is a mod fans have been dreaming of since the early days. It does exactly what the name suggests; it renders reduced-quality terrain past the maximum render distance. This allows for enormous view distances, while keeping a high FPS. Without this, the farthest you can see is roughly 32 chunks away. Distant Horizons changes that, letting you see more than 512 chunks away. It makes for some stunning views, finally providing some we’ve always wanted to see while making epic towers and mountain builds even more beautiful. It’s in alpha as of writing, but it’s still phenomenal even in its infancy.

Mezz

After installing a hefty quantity of mods, you’re going to be overwhelmed by all the new blocks, recipes, and items stuffed in your game. If you want to make learning these easier, and sidestep the issue of having 50 wiki pages open simultaneously, Just Enough Items is for you! It’s an item and recipe viewing mod, adding an interface that lets you browse every item in the game. You can then view how they’re crafted, or what recipes they’re used in, giving you the freedom to forget the thousands of recipes your game boasts. It also pairs wonderfully with Jade, an information HUD mod, making it even easier to navigate heavily modded worlds.

Sbom_xela

There are a bunch of mob packs available, but none can match the impressive scale of Alex’s Mobs. It adds 89 new mobs, most of these being real-world creatures. Almost any animal you can think of will be in here, including bears, gorillas, elephants, sharks, tigers, and loads more. These aren’t just for aesthetics. They all serve a purpose, with each animal having unique drops or mechanics. If these aren’t enough animals for you, then you’ll be happy to hear the mod is compatible with Friends & Foes by Faboslav, which adds all the mobs Mojang intended to add, but never did.

Vectorwing

Farming in the base game is a bit dull, with there being little to no variation in the items you grow, other than how much they heal you. Farmer’s Delight does a remarkable job at correcting this issue, massively expanding your farming options. Including sandwiches, salads, sushi, and more, you can spend hours cooking. All these have a variety of effects, including nourishment, which makes it so your hunger will stay at the max level for more than two seconds. It also pairs well with Nether’s Delight, which is the same mod but for the Nether, letting you become the culinary master of hell.

JellySquid

It’s no wonder games are rarely made in Java, which makes them perform terribly, and Mojang has done little to optimize it. If they won’t do it, then trust the modding community to fix it, which is exactly what Sodium does. It can give you over three times the amount of frames, letting you finally run the game smoothly. This has the excellent effect of allowing you to push the graphics further, whether that’s with 4K realistic texture packs, stunning shaders, or humungous render distances. It’s all possible with Sodium.

triode_

Every “Minecraft” player has at one point dreamed of creating their own ship to embark on a voyage across the high seas. Or maybe it’s the skies that call you, and you’d love to someday ride above the clouds, flying along peacefully with the world beneath your feet. This mod lets you do both of those things, and more! Valkyrien Skies is a library mod, which adds physics for ships. On its own, it doesn’t add any gameplay functionality. However, paired with Eureka, you can make anything into a ship. Airships are also available, meaning you can finally build things like planes and blimps. You can even master both, and build your own personal aircraft carrier.

Starmute

There’s no shortage of terrain mods available, with many these days adding excessively large terrain. These look nice, but overall aren’t fun to play since they’re a total nuisance to traverse. Instead, we suggest you download Terralith, which doesn’t add any new blocks, but instead improves the vanilla ones, and implements new biomes using the vanilla blocks. These include floating islands, ocean trenches, underground biomes, and realistic biomes like Yellowstone and Highlands. Out of every biome mod, this is the one we recommend the most, since it improves vanilla generation without the complexities of a hundred new block types.

Simibubi and co.

First place goes to a mod so impressive, it created a genre of mods; it’s the contraption mod - Create. Rather than older mods, where the end goal was a magic block that took hundreds of diamonds to make, everything Create adds is relatively simple to make. It also makes use of vanilla resources, which are completely useless in the base game, like kelp. The complexity comes from the creativity it allows for, letting you build complicated assembly lines, mech suits, chunk destroyers, and so much more. There are also tons of expansion mods. We recommend Steams ‘n’ Rails, focusing on the trains, and even adding monorails. If you want to build a working tank, then try Big Cannons, adding exactly what its name suggests.


What’s the most impressive thing you’ve built in modded “Minecraft?” We’d love to hear about it, so let us know in the comments section!