How to make Minecraft look like the official trailer

Minecraft has some very iconic art designs. With its combination of pixelated textures with blocky worlds, it has influenced a huge wave of spin-offs and rip-offs and has helped revitalize the more retro design themes that indie games are known for.

The trailers for Minecraft, however, are iconic in their own right, with many players preferring the look of the trailers to the actual game. So, is it possible, then, to replicate the look of the trailers in-game?

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How to get the iconic trailer appearance in Minecraft

The Resource Pack

What the world looks like when using the Barebones resource pack (Image via Minecraft)

The first of the three major components used to change the look and feel of Minecraft is the resource pack applied to the game. This completely overhauls and changes the game’s textures and sounds.

The resource pack that emulates the trailers the best is the Barebones resource back. Currently available in-game, this resource pack makes everything appear much simpler than in the base game. The tree leaves are complete blocks, much of the detail has been removed from textures, and colors are much flatter.

A lot of the textures are straight ports over from the trailers. Grass, for example, uses the same simple three-lined texture as can be seen in the trailers.

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The Shader

The look of water when using Sildur's Enchanced Default Fancy shader (Image via Minecraft)

Players can opt for several shaders to enhance the features of their resource pack. The resource pack shown off in all the images found in this article is Sildur’s Enhanced Default Fancy.

The shader adds a bit of shadow and depth to all the objects in the world, mimicking the more cinematic appearance of the trailer. The water found in this shader is much better looking than vanilla water, which once again helps elevate the game to a more cinematic nature found in the game’s trailers.

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The Mods

The water effect as found in the Effective mod (Image via Minecraft)

There are a handful of mods that players will need to install to get the game looking as close to the trailers as possible.

Most of these mods are framework mods that allow other features, such as shaders, to function properly.

The only true mod that players require to enhance their gameplay is a simple mod known as Effective. The mod was natively developed for Fabric and only has a port to Forge. It adds splashing effects to water when mobs jump into it, which can be seen in several trailers, as well as adds a beautiful waterfall effect to water that runs into pools of water.

Once all of these disparate aspects have been combined, the player should have a gameplay experience that looks nearly identical to that found in the game's trailers.