I recently came across the YouTuber ItsMarloe and his Chill Minecraft series. I liked how calm his series felt, so I decided to use his modlist to build my own modpack. In doing so I found that if you carefully select your mods, you can improve the atmosphere of Minecraft without changing the gameplay too much.
Tweaking the Game
Vanilla Tweaks isn’t a mod per se, more of a data pack and resource pack generator. You can choose from a list of tweaks to modify your game experience, then generate a resource pack or a data pack that will do these things for you. I used it to add things like bushy leaves and a round sun/moon to my game, but you can use it to add any combination of tweaks to your game.
The best thing about this is that you don’t even need to be running with Forge/NeoForge/Fabric to be using these tweaks. You can install them into a vanilla Minecraft installation and they will still work as intended. The caveat is that if you are running modded Minecraft some of the tweaks won’t work with some graphics optimisation mods, such as Sodium.
Immersive Sound
Two mods included in ItsMarloe’s playlist were Ambient Sounds and Presence Footsteps.
Ambient Sounds adds, well, ambient sounds to Minecraft based on your current environment. If you are wandering a jungle you may hear the chirping of cicada, climb a mountain and you hear the whistle of cold winds, underground you will hear echoes of creatures unknown.
Hearing seagulls at the beach makes me want to add them in the game. Perhaps I’ll develop Bok’s Banging Birds next, although Alex’s Mobs already has seagulls.
Presence Footsteps changes the sounds of your footsteps depending on what you are walking on. Grass crunches underfoot, wood creaks and groans, stone is rough and dusty. And it doesn’t just affect players – other mobs are affected too.
With both of these mods installed the atmosphere of Minecraft is vastly improved. You feel like you are living in a real breathing world, a world you can feel just by walking around it.
Eye of the Beholder
Alongside the visual modifications I had from Vanilla Tweaks, I also installed Sodium to optimise the renderer, Iris Shaders and Complementary Shaders to improve the graphics, and Better Clouds for more realistic clouds.
Shaders aren’t free – they come with a performance cost. So I was worried that my laptop wouldn’t be able to run the game with shaders, or that I may need to reduce my view distance.
When I loaded into the world and started exploring I found beauty I had never seen before in my Minecraft world. I was exploring on a boat, so 1ater was the first thing I noticed. The water reflects the terrain now, so cliffs, islands, and mountains will appear grander than before.
A white hot sun disappears over the horizon, casting god rays over the terrain. Shadows shift, and the light changes from bright white to yellow-orange to a dark blue. I often found myself watching the sunset before I went back to my bed for the night, even if it meant dodging a few zombies and skeletons.
Then there was the first time I went underwater and I saw beams of light filtering through kelp. As you go deeper in the water, things get darker, just as in real life.
When I thought I had gotten used to the shaders, I found it still held a few surprises. I was digging a mineshaft to begin my strip mining operation, when I noticed light moving across one of the blocks in a weird way. At first I thought it was a glitch, but then I looked up and I realised it was the middle of the day. The screenshot doesn’t do it justice, but the light was shining on the block at different angles as the sun passed overhead!
As if this wasn’t enough, I experienced my first rainstorm with the shaders installed. After the storm ended, layers of damp mist covered the grass below my feet, and when I looked up there was a goddamned rainbow signalling the end of the rain!
Complementary Shaders comes in two varieties: Reimagined tries to maintain the feel of Vanilla, only with better graphics, whereas Unbound tries to make Minecraft look as real as possible. I went with Reimagined, but I decided to test out Unbound.
The lighting in Unbound is slightly different, likely using a different model. I don’t think its “better”, just different. The main things I noticed in Unbound were the sky and the water. The sky now has realistic clouds and a round sun. This looks good, but feels less like the block game we’re used to.
One thing I liked was the new water effect – water now has ripples and waves. This impacts the reflections as well, making oceans and lakes feel natural, rather than large bodies of flat, unmoving water.
Minecraft, but Better
Adding these mods and shaders hasn’t fundamentally changed the base gameplay of Minecraft. The mod I have installed that changes things the most is actually my own mod, Bok’s Banging Butterflies. But the atmosphere is more immersive, with the ambient sounds, realistic lighting, and environmental effects. Playing with these mods is a much more relaxing experience than before.
These mods aren’t for everyone. There’s something beautiful about the simplicity of a block game using pixel art. The basic graphics are a charm that shaders and immersion mods can take away from. But I’ve been playing Minecraft for over fifteen years now, so it’s nice to try something different.
I didn’t know Minecraft could be this good.
