Turning Vanilla Minecraft into a realistic-looking survival simulator has been a dream of every Minecraft player. From realistically flowing water to granny sand physics created from blenders, Minecraft can be made realistic while keeping the blocky aesthetic the game has always been famous for.
We will not only make Minecraft look realistic but feel like a living world by overhauling the biome, texture, and ambiance.
To make Minecraft look realistic, you need to have a beefy computer. Your PC will take a heavy load running all the high-resolution resource packs and shaders.
What Are Shaders, Resources-packs, and Mods?
Shaders will give you dynamic lightning from the sun’s setting to the burning of lava. It will also make the torch in your hand glow without placing them. It can be very handy while mining because you don’t have to stop every time and place a torch to light the way.
Resource packs are the texture of every block in Minecraft. You can change the texture of sand, wood, and cobblestone from pixelated to extremely detailed blocks by giving them HD textures.
The basic vanilla texture block is 16×16 pixel resolutions, but we can pump those resolutions up to 2048, but that would be too power-consuming and unnecessary.
Mods allow you to change the core physics of Minecraft or include additional creatures and items in the game. It can change the gameplay mechanics, and it is needed to add physics-based realism into the game, like audio cues, dynamic trees, and many more.
How to Make Minecraft Look Realistic
You can either make Minecraft visually and aesthetically pleasing or use mods that will somehow keep the dynamism of real life, like the falling of trees, realistic dropping off items, or shattering of blocks while mining. I will provide you with the best of both options by keeping all things in balance.
Install Shader, Mods, and Resources-packs
By installing Forge in your windows, you will have the option to store and use mods directly from your windows folders to the game. Make sure to install java on your computer since the game we are modifying is a Java version of Minecraft.
Once you install Forge, you can see the Forge in the installation version of Minecraft beside the play option. Select the Forge option and enter the game.
You can now see the Mods option inside the game main game menu. The mod button is now available for you to select or deselect from the list of mods you download.
On the lower-left corner, you can see the Open Mod Folder. Clicking the button will direct you to the folder where you can paste Mods to apply in the game.
Shader, Mods, and Resources-packs You Need For Realistic Minecraft
There is a lot of Content that completely describes how Minecraft looks and plays. Some are based on a fantasy that brings back dragons and dinosaurs, while some are more cyberpunk aesthetics.
Our approach is to change vanilla Minecraft into a more realistic experience where you can emerge into the ambiance and sound of nature.
Fresh Animations Mod
The mod gives fun and fluent animations to many of the static creatures. You can now see goats and other animals jumping and leaping with joy. It feels like the creature is more lively and has more personality to them.
Terraforged
Terraforge is a close-to-life-size terrain generator where you can view high hills that will take you the most time to reach their peak, unlike vanilla Minecraft which will take you a minute or two to climb small chunks of hills.
You can experience the massive terrain of the mod while exploring all its biomes. I first installed biomes o’ plenty, but the mod has more variation to terrains generation, whereas Terraforge is more suited to real-life terrain generation. Every terrain is scaled up to massive-looking hills and mountains, so you might want to extend the render distance to max.
Dynamic trees And Better Foliage
You don’t want a floating tree when breaking its stump? It might take away the illusion of realism, so I suggest you add a dynamic tree that adds variation to trees, including branches sticking out. Trees also fall realistically like other survival games once you cut them.
Better Foliage will bring out the little shrubs from blocky grass, making them more dynamic in shape. The combination of both makes the forest biomes dense and realistic. The trees are no longer just above your head. Instead, they are way high above in those branches where they are supposed to be. Leaves fall from trees gently, which adds realism to already beautiful trees.
Realistic 3D Item Drops
Now no more picking up rotating floating items like booster packs or health kits. Every item you drop will react to the real-world physics of the game. If you throw any block from the top of the hill, it will stumble all the way down to the flat surface.
Items are also non-stackable when dropped. You will have a cluster of blocks and items laying down individually, creating realism to the mess.
BSL Shaders
I use a BSL shader all the time. It adds atmospheric effects like real-time shadows, ambient occlusion, volumetric bloom light, cel-shading, depth of field, and many more. You also have various customization in terms of graphics.
Patrix Resource Pack And SEUS
The combination of both shader and resource-pack makes the game look realistic in its own way. Patrix Resource-pack three texture resolutions that balance performance and graphics. 32x , 128x, 256x. A higher number means better details in graphics but low on performance.
SEUS (Sonic Ether’s Unbelievable Shaders) perfectly suits the Patrix resource pack. However, you can use both separately but using them together compliments one another. You can also tweak shadow quality, ambient light, and other shader options to make it more realistic.
Conquest Resource-pack
It’s one of those resource packs that will take you back to the medieval age. Its grim and rusty texture makes the scenario of you in an old tavern. Torch and fire animation is also tweaked to match the realistic fire effect.
If you have played Skyrim, you will feel at home with the Conquest Resource Pack.
There are a plethora of mods, resource packs, and shaders you can add to make it as realistic as possible. It’s up to you and the limitations of your computer that will determine how realistic you want your Minecraft game to be.
These are my favorites. You might have your taste for realism. Experiment with everything until you come across something that suits your play style.
Fancy Block Particles
This mod will make particle effects more realistic by adding more details to bland particles such as campfire blocks while breaking. If you combine this mod with the Physics mod, then it looks like breaking real blocks as the pieces scatter once you break a block.
Dynamic Surroundings
The mod will add a whole new depth to your game experience by adding a bunch of sound effects and visual effects that make the surroundings more realistic.
You can now find fireflies at night glowing around the grasses of open plane fields, an aurora above the sky in colder biomes, fire steam coming out of blocks near lava, and other many little details.
Each biome will also have its own set of sound effects. You can hear birds chirping in forest biomes and the wind blowing at a high altitude. It’s a pleasant audio experience to immerse players where audio and visuals are matched together in a perfect sense.
