I’ve personally been playing Minecraft for a very long time, and for the past 4 years I don’t think I’ve played fully vanilla Minecraft (no mod loaders, no modifications) since. In fact, I don’t plan to either.
Here is a list of mods which I use every single time I play Minecraft, a short explanation on what they do, and an image to show what it does (if applicable).
All of these mods barely modify the actual gameplay of Minecraft, keeping it as vanilla as possible. They’re either optimisation mods or quality of life mods which make it seem like Mojang actually puts effort into Minecraft by making it a polished, full-fledged game.
Remember to read how to install mods using Prism Launcher first!
| Mod Name | Function | Example Image |
|---|---|---|
| 3D Skin Layers | Self explanatory, makes players 3D so that they aren’t just flat boring rectangles. |  |
| Advancement Plaques | Replaces boring advancement messages in the chat with a nice plaque which appears and then disappears at the top of your screen |  |
| AdvancementInfo Reloaded | Changes the advancement information screen with something more informative and tells you how to get certain advancements. |  |
| AmbientSounds | Adds nice ambient sounds to Minecraft. E.g. If you're in the woods, then birds will chirp. If youre in a snowy biome, you'll hear snow. If you're out at sea, you will hear the waves. | Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z1QIyxFUas |
| AppleSkin | Shows a bit more information about foods, your hunger, and saturation levels. Also shows how much health will be restored if you eat food. |    |
| Better Mount HUD | Improves the ingame HUD when riding something like a horse, etc. Doesn't hide YOUR hunger and health, and only replaces the XP bar with stamina when you jump | |
| Better Third Person | Many improvements to third person, can't list them all here. Also automatically changes to 3rd person when riding boats and animals I believe | |
| BetterCommandBlockUI | Basically an IDE for those who are hacky enough to use command blocks. Makes it a lot easier to write commands! |  |
| BetterF3 | Changes the F3 Information screen to be more human readable and polished |  |
| Blur+ | Makes Minecraft feel a bit more polished like other games by adding a bit of blur when you open a menu. |  |
| Chat Heads | Adds heads to chat messages! |  |
| Continuity | Allows OptiFine texture pack features to work with Iris | |
| CraftPresence | Gives Minecraft a Discord Rich Presence |  |
| Cycle Title Screen Splash | Simply cycles the text on the title screen to update a few seconds. |  |
| Detail Armor Bar | Adds a bit of information regarding your armour, e.g. damage |  |
| Distant Horizons | Allows you to have very far render distances without compromising performance. It is a LOD (Level of Detail) mod which adjusts the quality of chunks based on how far away you are from them, allowing your GPU to not render absolutely every chunk and letting you have very far render distances. |  Optimisation |
| DurabilityPlus | Adds durability tooltips to your items. Useful to know when your items will break. |  |
| Dynamic Crosshair | Changes the regular Minecraft "+" crosshair to be a bit more dynamic - it changes based on what you're doing, whether you're mining or fighting, etc. |  |
| Dynamic FPS | Reduces resource usage while Minecraft is in the background or idle. E.g. if Minecraft is minimised, then it will temporarily make GPU usage A LOT less so that you can use other apps. | Optimisation |
| EntityCulling | Hides (prevents from rendering) mobs which you cant see, e.g. behind blocks. Good for optimisation, HOWEVER, if you decide to use Xray and also MobESP, then your highlighted mobs will be invisible because they arent being rendered as they aren't in your physical line of sight. You'll only be able to see their outline. |  |
| Fabric API | Self explanatory, pretty much every Fabric mods needs this to run. | |
| FabricSkyBoxes | Allows Fabric to have custom sky boxes defined in texture packs like in OptiFine. Use with Iris. |  |
| Falling Leaves | Adds little falling leaf particles under trees. A nice little touch. |  |
| FerriteCore | Reduces Minecraft's memory footprint. (Less RAM usage) | Optimisation |
| Forge Early Loading Screen | Adds en early loading screen to Fabric or Quilt just like they have it in Forge and NeoForge. It's so that you don't think that Minecraft is broken because you launched it 30 seconds ago and the window still hasn't popped up (it's still loading). It's nice to see the mod loading process. |  |
| ImmediatelyFast | Optimises immediate mode rendering in Minecraft | Optimisation |
| Indium | Sodium addon which provides support for the Fabric Rendering API | Optimisation |
| Iris | A Modern Shaders mod. It's OptiFine but A LOT better. |   Optimisation |
| Jade | Tells you what you're looking at and gives a bit of information. |   |
| Lithium | Makes a wide range of performance improvements to Minecraft. Legendary. | Optimisation |
| Mod Menu | Adds a mod menu to view the list of mods you have installed. HIGHLY RECOMMEND. |  |
| ModernFix | More performance improvements for minecraft | Optimisation |
| More Chat History | Increases the chat history from 100 to 16384 (Minecraft maximum) | |
| Mouse Tweaks | Enhances inventory management by adding various additional functions to the usual mouse buttons. THIS MOD IS ABSOLUTELY USEFUL. YOU NEED IT!!! | Explanations here |
| NotEnoughAnimations | Adds a few animations in third person, etc. |  |
| Pick Up Notifier | Shows what you picked up. |   |
| Shulker Box Tooltip | Shows whats inside a shulker box when you hover over it in your inventory. |  |
| Smooth scroll | Makes scrolling in minecraft much more smooth. | It adds smooth scrolling to many parts of the game but heres just an example.  |
| Sodium | Improves frame rates and reduces lag spikes. Iris needs this to work. | Optimisation |
| Sodium Extra | Adds even more optimisations | Optimisation |
| Sounds | Adds sound effects to almost everything. its very nice. Also improves vanilla sounds. | Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIkTKYTFVFo |
| Status Effect Bars | Adds a new status effect overlay |   |
| Talk bubbles | Adds chat bubbles above players' heads when they talk. Like in roblox. |  |
| Title Tweaks | Fixes some stupid issues with Minecraft titles |  |
| Visuality | Adds nice particle effects |   |
| WaveyCapes | Animates minecraft capes in a more fluid way by adding some physics to it |  |
| Xaero's Minimap | Adds a vanilla-looking minimap for Minecraft. |  |
| Xaero's World Map | Get a full screen map by pressing M! |  |
| Your Reputation | A Jade plugin which displays your reputation on a tooltip with each villager. Now you get to know which villagers hate you if you punched them! Needs jade. |    |
Thanks for the mod list!The mods you listed are quite helpful, and many of them are the ones I often use during gameplay.