Ten Mods that Make Minecraft 1.21 feel like a whole New Game
Minecraft 1.21 has brought a fresh wave of new features and new excitement, but there are still things about Minecraft that you can vastly improve with the addition of just a few mods without changing the game itself, so you can experience 1.21 as it was meant to be.
If you have you never modded Minecraft, it's incredibly easy with the use of a Minecraft mod launcher like Prism or Curseforge.
It's still very early for Minecraft 1.21 to have many mods available yet, especially the content-related mods, but there are already hundreds of mods available, many of which improve Minecraft's usability and visual display without affecting Vanilla gameplay.
These 10 mods will transform your Minecraft experience, making it feel like a whole new game without modifying the game mechanics.
There's one mod at the end of the list which adds maps to the game, which does change the gameplay quite a bit, making it easier to get around, locate structures and mobs, even underground. This will change the game quite a bit, though in my opinion, for the better. I've introduced maps to my family and friends, and they no longer want to play without them! Feel free to leave that (or any of these mods) off of your own game.
Note that when you install these mods in Prism or Curseforge, there will be a number of other mods installed that are required to run. A good mod launcher like these will handle this automatically. Here's my overall Mod List in Prism:
Download this Modpack on Curseforge
I made this into a modpack on Curseforge. It's about as simple as modpacks get, but I wanted to start with something simple, and we'll expand on it as more mods become available.
Download it here: Jangro's Ten Vanilla+
Visual Enhancements
Shaders and Graphics Performance with Iris, Sodium, and Indium
If you want to take your Minecraft visuals to the next level, using shaders is the way to go. Shaders like Complementary Reimagined, BSL, and Bliss provide stunning graphical improvements, including realistic lighting, shadows, and water effects. To run these shaders smoothly, you'll need Iris, Sodium, and Indium mods. Iris is a shader loader that optimizes performance, Sodium is a performance mod that boosts frame rates, and Indium adds additional compatibility. Together, these mods make your Minecraft world look absolutely breathtaking, with better performance!
World and Exploration Enhancements
Distant Horizons
Ever wished you could see farther in your Minecraft world without sacrificing performance? Distant Horizons is a mod that extends the render distance of your game, allowing you to see more of the world without major performance hits. This mod uses a technique called "level of detail" to render distant objects with lower detail, which helps maintain smooth gameplay. With Distant Horizons, your exploration feels more immersive and grand.
Even though the render distance is set to just 6 chunks in my world, I can see 128 chunks away.
Take a close look in my world above! Is that a village over there? Maybe there's a cartographer to sell me a vault map!
Gameplay and Utility Enhancements
Crafting Tweaks
Crafting Tweaks is a handy mod that adds several small tweaks to the crafting grid. You can rotate, balance, and clear the crafting grid with a single click, making the crafting process more efficient and user-friendly. This mod is perfect for players who enjoy building and crafting without the hassle of manual adjustments.
Mouse Tweaks
Mouse Tweaks is a quality-of-life mod that enhances how you interact with your inventory using the mouse. It allows for faster item movement, making it easier to drag, drop, and organize items. Inventory management in Minecraft is hard, and something that many more game-changing mods can improve on. But these simple inventory buttons are a nice small change that doesn't change the game.
It provides simple tweaks to using your mouse more for managing your inventory. Drag items around a grid, left click with an item to pick up more of that item, shift-click items to move them between inventories and more. Check out the Modrinth page for details. Play with it to learn what it does. I promise you'll love it!
AppleSkin
Understanding your hunger and saturation levels can be a bit tricky in vanilla Minecraft. AppleSkin is a simple yet incredibly useful mod that adds detailed information about your hunger and saturation directly to your HUD. See in this screenshot, you can see some of the hocks are yellow? That's the current saturation. It'll also show you what a given food item will do to your hunger if you eat it, by hovering over that food item.
It's a little thing, but once you've used it, you'll definitely miss not having it!
Jade
Jade is a mod that provides in-depth information about the blocks you're looking at, including what tool is needed to break it, the contents of inventory blocks, the current state of crops, mob health, and breeding cooldowns. This mod is especially useful for both new and seasoned players who want to maximize their efficiency and knowledge of the game. With Jade, you'll always have the information you need right at your fingertips. Jade is very configurable. For example, here's how to change the position of the Jade overlay.
Inventory Profiles Next
Inventory management can be a hassle, especially when your chests are overflowing with items. Inventory Profiles Next streamlines this process by adding customizable sorting options, allowing you to organize your inventory and chests with ease. This mod saves you time and keeps your items neatly arranged.
Here you can see when viewing an inventory like a chest, there are buttons for sorting, and moving items back and forth in your inventory. The tips window shows you different ways to use this to move only some items.
Just Enough Items (JEI)
Crafting in Minecraft can sometimes be overwhelming with so many recipes to remember. Just Enough Items (JEI) is an essential mod that displays all crafting recipes in-game. With a simple and intuitive interface, JEI lets you search for items and view their recipes, making crafting and survival more accessible.
Want to know how to make the new Oozing potion? Search for it in JEI and click on it, or hover and type R for Recipe
Here's how to make the new mace! If you're in a crafting table, there's a button to move items into place from your inventory, or an indication of missing items.
Want to see all the things that can be crafted with a particular item like a breeze rod? Search for it in JEI and right click on it. Or hover and type "U" for uses.
Different crafting options are shown at the top in tabs, like the brewing stand
Navigation and Mapping Enhancements
This one might be a bit controversial to some purists, and I cannot disagree that adding maps to Minecraft does indeed change the game dramatically. Adding maps makes it much easier to find structures, biomes, and mobs, even underground. Personally, I feel that Minecraft makes it too difficult to find underground structures like dungeons. Though in 1.21, you can buy maps to vaults from cartographer villagers! There should be maps to all types of underground structures in Minecraft, in my opinion. In the meantime, that's why I advocate for adding a mapping mod to your game, and my favorite is Xaero's maps.
Xaero's Minimap and World Map
Exploration is a huge part of Minecraft, and having a reliable map can enhance your adventures. Xaero's Minimap provides an in-game mini-map that shows your surroundings, while Xaero's World Map offers a full-screen map of your explored world. These maps are customizable and highly detailed, helping you navigate and mark important locations with ease.
The minimap will always show you your surrounding world in a moving map, complete with markers for surrounding mobs. This is very configurable in the settings interface which you can get by typing 'Y'. For example, I like my map locked with north always up rather than rotating dynamically. And I like my map in the upper right of the screen, all of which I can configure. The yellow dots are all friendly mobs. Darker ones are below my Y-level, probably fish in the water in this case.
Hit the M key to bring up the world map which is filled in as you explore. It is a village up there to the north!
Full Mod List
Here's a summary of all the mods in this post, including the dependencies. If you want to import this into Curseforge or Prism, here's a zip file export.
- Crafting Tweaks
- Iris / Sodium / Indium
- Distant Horizons
- Inventory Profiles Next
- Xaero's Minimap
- Xaero's World Map
- Just Enough Items
- AppleSkin
- Mouse Tweaks
- Jade
Dependencies