Minecraft has always been known for its arcady simplistic aesthetic. Despite its beautiful, sprawling landscapes, for some people, it just isn’t easy enough on the eyes. After all, each block is only 16×16. Vanilla blocks like grass, cobblestone, and wooden logs, although iconic, are often seen as repetitive and bland by some critics. Because of this, today, we’re going to go over something different. Through the intelligent use of texture packs, also known as resource packs, we can change the look of our game by replacing the in-game textures with new ones. There are thousands of packs made for all different types of people, but just for today, we’re going to go over some of the most realistic looking ones to hopefully change that blocky aesthetic into one that even the most critical graphics-hogs can appreciate. Let’s begin.
Best Realistic Resource Packs
These are the best ‘realistic’ resource packs I can find. These packs are meant to improve the graphical fidelity of the game, and while some may not necessarily make the game look like real life, they will definitely look less blocky/arcady than Vanilla. Most of these have much higher resolutions than the basic 16×16 Vanilla pack, so expect some heavy impact on performance. All of these packs will be for Java, and all will benefit from using Optifine.
RTX Ray Tracing Pack For Java – The official RTX textures on Bedrock Edition painstakingly converted to Java Edition. This pack is moreso meant to show off the ray traced lighting features of Nvidia and Minecraft’s hard work, but it also functions as a pretty cool texture pack! Definitely one of the better ones, especially since it is official.
Stratum – A high resolution, realistically themed texture pack that features physically based rendering and Parallax Occlusion Mapping support through the use of high quality Specular and Normal maps. This pack prides itself on shader compatibility, AAA quality, and maximum resolutions up to 2048x. When paired with its corresponding shader pack, Continuum 2.0, light will interact with the textures in a realistic way as if it was actually real. This also allows the textures to support 3D details by utilizing depth information stored in their height map. This greatly enhances the look of textures in game, albeit at the expense of performance.
NAPP 3.0 – A lovely, textured pack that has the benefit of being relatively recent when it comes to what updates it is available for. Surprisingly enough, NAPP is almost done with the 1.17 blocks and is being consistently updated with a public roadmap tracking its progress. NAPP has a central idea of transforming the whole game into a fresh and completely new look. The creator, Not Another Photorealistic Pack (interesting name), is a professional artist. Also, the development of high resolution textures is his specialty, and it becomes immediately apparent that he is a professional.
Faithful 512×512 – One of the most popular texture packs brought to superfluous detail through the use of an extremely high resolution upgrade. If you are unaware, Faithful has always been a texture pack that takes the default look of Minecraft and buffs up the resolution to make the game look more detailed. However, this texture pack goes crazy, having the resolution be 32 times larger than the default! That’s insane! Because of the relatively easy nature behind designing these blocks, Faithful is usually quick to update to the latest versions. This texture pack supports the latest version of 1.18 splendidly.
Conclusion
That’s all we got for you today! Unfortunately, to get the full experience of some of these texture packs, you’ll need to purchase them. Yeah, with actual real money. In any case, these packs act as an example to show us that even a game as simple as Minecraft can have photorealistic graphics, with enough tweaking, that is. If you’re interested in using any of these packs for yourself, check out our guide on installation here. In any case, I wish you all a wonderful day!
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