One of the best things about Minecraft is that you can make it your own by adding custom skins and mods. This article shows you eight of the best Minecraft mods you must check out.
Types of Minecraft Mods
Minecraft features three forms of mods that differ mainly in their mode of operation, the sphere of influence, and the degree of change they bring to the base game.
1. Client-Side Mods
Client-side mods only make changes to a single system’s gameplay, which means that a mod you download to your system will only be visible to you. Consequently, your client-side mod will not function in multiplayer unless you also install the same on the server system. The installation of client-side mods requires a mod loader program like Curse Forge, Minecraft Mods, or Fabric.
2. Server-Based Mods
Server-based or server-side mods are implemented on the official server software of the Minecraft engine. These mods are generally used to support the administration of servers by adding features like kicking and banning.
Alternatively, many server mods are designed to be wrappers. These mods do not directly make changes to the primary server JAR file but send commands based on the output produced by the server.
3. ModPacks
Modpacks are bundles of mods built to function alongside each other. They supplement each other’s features, giving you a supreme modded experience on their Minecraft sessions.
The bundled mods are generally configured around a central theme, such as fantasy, tech, pop culture, or even specific game recreations.
Modpacks often come with custom launchers and installers that make downloading and running the mods easier than downloading and configuring each piece separately.
Minecraft Mods Worth Trying
1. Minecolonies
- Genre: fantasy, town building
- Developed by: Let’s Dev Together
Minecolonies lets users build NPC-powered towns and colonies with exquisite buildings and structures. As you defend your territory from village raids in the vanilla Minecraft experience, you’ll have to protect your town from various intruders and other outside threats. This fun mod has players collecting, strategizing, crafting, building, and defending.
Minecolonies gives you access to more than 1300 custom schematic buildings that you can place anywhere within the colony’s boundaries. You can see a holographic view of the building in your desired location before you place it. You can also add, modify, replace or delete existing substructures.
2. Aether II: Highlands
- Genre: mythical fantasy
- Developed by: Gilded Games
Aether II is a sequel mod to Aether, one of the most popular Minecraft mods to date. The mod adds a separate world in the game, high above the clouds. This world is similar to the Nether region and is built comprehensively, with floating islands comprising most of the accessible space. It contains multiple biomes, dungeons, bosses, mega-bosses, and tons of loot.
To enter the Aether, you need to create a portal out of quartz blocks, then light it with water – a process similar to entering the Nether. The only difference is that to enter the Nether you need a portal made out of obsidian lit with flint and steel. This quartz portal can be used to exit the Aether realm, too. You can also jump off the floating islands into the clouds to exit the Aether in a pinch, though they may get considerably damaged if they land on the ground.
3. OptiFine
- Genre: technical mod
- Developed by: sp614x
OptiFine, used by millions of players worldwide every day, started as a small mod called OptiFog, and is designed to enhance the overall gameplay.
It is one of the oldest mods available in Minecraft and has come a long way from being an FPS booster to performing a range of additions, modifications, and corrections. OptiFine comes with basic features like fog removal, smooth frames, hidden geometry removal, and loading optimizations.
The latest version of OptiFine sports features like texture packs, smart texture pack switching, animated terrain, faster mipmaps, item customization, and much more. Custom light settings, fonts, visual configurations, variable render distance, and added sky components like the sun, moon, and night sky, complete with stars, have pushed OptiFine to the top in Minecraft modding. Learn how to download and install OptiFine.
Tip: learn how to equip your Minecraft character with a cool OptiFine cape.
4. RLCraft
- Genre: RPG
- Developed by: Shivaxi
RLCraft is one of the best-known modpacks of all time. It has been featured in videos by Minecraft legends like PewDiePie and Dream. It is considered a very brutal RPG mod that has players reeling. In survival mode, eating food won’t heal you. Instead, you have to craft various items, like first-aid kits and salves, and use them on specific injured parts of the body to heal and bolster your health. Additionally, you must keep yourself hydrated and cool or warm depending on the circumstances. Failure to do so will cost health eventually.
RLCraft is packed with challenging bosses and mega-bosses who make it hard to get any loot. Only the bravest of players dare venture into the world of RLCraft. Not all come back the same way they went in.
5. Better Minecraft
- Genre: Quality of Life
- Developed by: SharkieFPS
If you’re playing Minecraft for the first time and want the vanilla experience without overloading your world with mods that add extensive features, Better Minecraft is the modpack for you. It adds various quality-of-life changes to the game and gets rid of some of the annoying features of the base game.
Better Minecraft consists of over 250 mods, some of which are mentioned in this list already, and once you get used to the new mechanics, you wouldn’t want to play the original anymore.
With this modpack on, your world will become more lively with new biomes, more dungeons to explore, a new village system, deeper caves, and tougher mobs. The game is significantly harder than the vanilla experience, but with mods like “Graveyard,” which turns your body into a chest so that your items and XP do not despawn, you’ll come to enjoy exploring every aspect of it.
6. Just Enough Items
Genre: assistive, recipe information
Developed by: Mezz, CFGrafanaStats
Once you start using Just Enough Items or JEI, you’ll wonder how you ever played Minecraft without it.
JEI lets players view the recipe for any craftable item in-game via a neat dedicated HUD on the inventory display, saving players from switching to the Minecraft wiki every time they forget the recipe of a specific item. The items include those from the default Minecraft game.
JEI significantly rises in importance once you start experimenting with other modpacks, as the base game already has many items to remember, and added modpacks generally double/triple their number. After a certain point, it becomes impossible to play without having JEI installed.
The mod allows you to:
- Left-click an item to see its crafting recipe.
- Right-click certain items to see all the recipes you can use them in.
- Hover over any item to see its name and to which modpack it belongs.
7. Pam’s HarvestCraft
- Genre: gardening, farming
- Developed by: MatrexsVigil
Pam’s HarvestCraft is a Minecraft mod that adds several farming concepts to the gameplay, including different kinds of seeds, farming mechanics, production chains, and seasonal trees.
The mod gives a break from having to consume vanilla Minecraft foods like cooked pork to restore health. It includes over 80 new crops, six discoverable garden bushes across the map, more than 50 fruit trees, dozens of new fish, and over 1400 new items and foods to be discovered, grown, cultivated, and consumed. In addition, it includes cotton as a rope, from which cotton string can be crafted, and a beekeeping add-on to obtain honey.
8. Biomes O’ Plenty
- Genre: environmental, exploration
- Developed by: Glitchfiend
Biomes O’ Plenty is one of our favorites on this list, as it adds a plethora of new biomes to the game, giving the players more areas to explore in the search for new loot. The mod also enhances preexisting biomes to make gameplay fun and improves biome blending so that all the chunks spawn in a more natural-looking manner.
All of the new biomes bring new plants, trees, fruits, building blocks, structures, and much more. Imagine the hundreds of new craftable options! As if it wasn’t enough to get new biomes for the overworld, Biomes O’ Plenty adds new biomes to the Nether. We suggest resting that shiny diamond armor before venturing into uncharted lands in the underworld dimension.
Learn more about all the biomes in Biomes O’ Plenty.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I download mods in Minecraft?
The Minecraft modding community is comprised of millions of players, thousands of modders, and over a hundred thousand major and minor mods. Most of these mods can be found in a .zip format. Libraries like CurseForge and Fabric feature these mods and can be used to safely download them, though due discretion is advised. Fabric also acts as a loader to install these mods in your Minecraft gameplay. If you want detailed instructions on installation, read our guide on installing Minecraft mods.
Where can I discuss and learn more about Minecraft mods online?
Try these Minecraft communities to delve into the world of Minecraft mods:
How many types of mods are there in Minecraft?
Even though there are thousands of mods across all versions of Minecraft, all of them can be broadly classified into four types based on the gameplay: creative, survival, adventure, and hardcore. Each type adds a unique flavor to the game, and all of the good modpacks deliver a blend of these four categories.
What is the most popular Minecraft mod ever?
With over 131 million downloads, Just Enough Items (JEI) is the most downloaded Minecraft mod of all time. JEI is a utility mod that allows players to see information, including recipes and uses, about items in the game.
JEI is an essential mod for anyone who plays Minecraft and is used by many professional Minecraft players and YouTubers. It is constantly being updated with new features and fixes and is compatible with the latest version of Minecraft.
Image credit: Unsplash
Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox
