Minecraft’s Vibrant Visuals update gets a release date

Minecraft

Swedish video game developer Mojang has confirmed the release date of Minecraft’s Vibrant Visuals update. First announced during the ‘Minecraft Live’ broadcast in March 2025, the ‘Vibrant Visuals’ update will roll out to Minecraft: Bedrock Edition on June 17.

Close to the launch of the Vibrant Visuals update, the Stockholm-based Minecraft maker also released a brand-new video titled ‘Minecraft’s Visual Refresh’ recently, showcasing how the game looks with its biggest graphical overhaul yet.

The Vibrant Visuals update aims to improve several graphical aspects of Minecraft, including directional lighting, volumetric fog, and more. As per the developers at Mojang, “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.”

In an earlier blog post, Minecraft developers explained the salient graphical changes: “Improvements including volumetric lighting mean you’ll be able to watch the sun’s rays carve across the Overworld, and every block will cast its own shadow. Light will shine through your windows, and you’ll be able to see reflections in water and on the surface of metallic blocks, while subsurface scattering brings a gentle glow to leaves and grass.”

“Mobs and items will also have more of a glow – spider’s eyes will be even more menacing in the dark, and torches will cast a radiant path back to your build. You can see this in action in the deep dark, too.”

“The sculk is now more emissive, more immersive, and it creates a really magical scene,” added Game Art Director Jasper Boerstra in the blog post.

Minecraft’s Vibrant Visuals update is purely a cosmetic update and will not affect the gameplay, claim the developers. It is also “backwards compatible with old worlds, and it runs locally”, which means that “players on a Realm can all play together regardless of whether or not they are using Vibrant Visuals”, the developers noted in the blog post.

As we mentioned in the beginning, the Vibrant Visuals update will launch only for Minecraft: Bedrock Edition and is set to arrive sometime in future for Minecraft: Java Edition. However, the developers warn that some of the Marketplace content won't be compatible with the Vibrant Visuals update at launch.