Minecraft has been around for over a decade and still, to this day, it’s a massively popular game. It’s easy to jump into, the graphics are colorful, appealing, and stylized, and it’s a wonderful place to stretch your imagination. Minecraft is definitely a great game, one of the best even, but it can be even better through mods. So, we gathered the top 10 best Minecraft mods that every fan should try out to enhance their experience.
Optifine or Fastcraft
We all know that Minecraft runs on most low-end hardware, but not without some significant changes to the graphics settings. There’s always room for more optimization, however, which is why Fastcraft is so darn useful for eking out as much performance as you can, especially if you plan on using mods.
Of course, we didn’t forgot about gamers with much beefier rigs. If you’d like to beautify Minecraft with better lighting, textures, and still gain a performance boost, there’s Optifine. You’ll gain access to more of Minecraft’s graphical settings, too, which is nice if you’d like to fine tune your blocky experience.
Decocraft
Minecraft gets better every year and it may very well be a perfect game, but it’s still lacking in one area: decorations. Sure, you can get really creative with the available pieces like sticking a pressure plate on a fence to create a table or placing stairs to resemble chairs and couches. Sadly, those are just workarounds, and the Decocraft aims to fix that.
With the Decocraft mod, over 3000 decorations are added to Minecraft, such as hanging chandeliers, grandfather clocks, tableware, lamps, actual tables and chairs, and more. Now you can truly decorate your house in ways you envisioned rather than a mere lookalike; in fact, we highly recommend using Decocraft to enhance the our list of creative Minecraft base ideas.
Aquaculture 2
Minecraft features a fair amount of activities that you can just get lost in, one of which is fishing. It’s a great source of food (fish can be eaten raw without being poisoned if you’re in a pinch) and it’s a calming experience most of the time, minus the Drowned. You might even get a nice enchantment, such as Mending!
The Aquaculture 2 mod expands on an already comfortable experience by adding over 30 new aquatic creatures to fish across the various biomes, new fishing rods with baits and hooks, and if you’re lucky you might find some sweet loot in lockboxes, treasure chests, and Neptune’s Bounty.
JourneyMap
Sorry, but Minecraft’s original map is straight A garbage and does very little except giving you a vague sense of where you are in the world. With the JourneyMap mod, you’re tossing that crappy paper map into the garbage for a sleek and new digital map with oodles of features to use.
For starters, JourneyMap actually showcases the variety of elevations. There are also handy tools for flipping through different maps such as topography, biomes, night and day, and cave layers. Best of all, JourneyMap shows nearby mobs, wild life, pets, villagers, and so on, which you can turn off individually if you feel it gives you too much of an advantage.
Lycanites Mobs
After your 10th or so playthrough of Minecraft, the number of hostile and friendly mobs starts to feel pretty small. More have been added since the game’s inception, but it doesn’t happen often enough, which is where the Lycanites Mobs mod comes in handy for breathing a deep breath of fresh air and life into Minecraft’s ecosystem.
With the Lycanites Mobs mod installed, over 100 new mobs are added to the game all over the various biomes and dimensions. More importantly, many of these new mobs—hostile or otherwise—are tameable and can be summoned at any time. Additionally, the mod includes new items (such as food), dungeons, and creature levels.
Advanced Hook Launcher
If there’s one thing you’ll be doing in Minecraft, more than anything, it’s running and climbing. It’s tiring just thinking about all that running you’ll be doing, but you can make life a lot easier with the Advanced Hook Launcher mod. Not only is navigating the world less painful, the mod makes you feel like Batman!
With the Advanced Hook Launcher mod, you’re getting exactly what’s advertised: a hook-shooting device that you can fire off into the distance to a nearby mountaintop and shimmy your way to the top. There are even different types, like the Pudge Hook, that are more useful for pulling mobs to you.
Thaumcraft
You know Minecraft is seriously lacking in? Magic. Enchantments and magical potions are nice, but it isn’t a fireball or a blast of ice. If you chose to skip out on Avalanche Software’s Hogwarts Legacy, then you can at least bring a fully-functioning and surprisingly deep magic system to Minecraft with Thaumcraft.
Here’s the rub: Thaumcraft isn’t going to make you into Gandalf right from the start. You’ll need to follow along with a mysterious quest to get started and even then you won’t casting magic until you rediscover ancient secrets. Is it worth it? Well, if you want to cast defensive and offensive spells or summon creatures, then absolutely.
Refined Storage
Any Minecraft player worth their salt has a room or even a separate building with a half a dozen or more chests full of junk. Sure, you could sort them and make neat little plaques to give you a vague sense of what each chest contains, but that takes far too much time, patience, and everything gets mixed up anyway if you aren’t sticking to the system.
Why not make sorting easier with the Refined Storage mod? It streamlines everything, not just storage, into an expandable network. You can search for specific items, toggle item types and ID, and even upgrade it to include a crafting table that allows you to pull materials straight from your storage.
Additional Structures
Minecraft is capable of generating some pretty stellar sceneries and structures, which other players can then try out by copying your Minecraft seed. However, after a few playthroughs, the mystique wears off a bit, largely due to the limited number of structures the game has access to.
Thankfully, the Additional Structures mod fixes that problem by doing exactly what’s advertised: new structures are added for Minecraft to pull from and generate in the world. You’ll find small structures like boulders, dead trees and oases in the deserts, or massive structures like Mayan-inspired pyramids with loot to collect. You’ll also find that The End gets a nice facelift with new structures, too!
MC Eternal
Just about every mod here on this list was meant to enhance the systems Minecraft already had in place—better fishing, more structures and mobs, and so on—but what if you wanted to overhaul Minecraft with a single modpack? For that, we have MC Eternal, a massive modpack containing some 300 mods all working in tandem.
Crack open MC Eternal and you’ll find over 750 quests (and growing), an economy system, new crafting recipes, and RPG elements where you can choose different classes like mage or mad scientist or combine bits and pieces from different classes into something unique. That’s just the tip of the iceberg though, far too many to list, but MC Eternal is perfect for fans who feel Minecraft has grown a little stale.
With that, we close the book on the top 10 best Minecraft mods that will undoubtedly breathe new life into the game for months and even years to come. If you do install some of these, let us know what you think of them in the comments or share your favorites. While you’re at it, check out the variety of content on Minecraft available here at Twinfinite down below.
