Minecraft mods: the best mods to transform your game

Minecraft mods are the best way to inject a new lease of life into the game. There’s something for everyone, and we’ve picked out the very best

Author:
Ryan Woodrow
Publish date:
Jul 12, 2023 8:14 AM EDT

Vanilla Minecraft is boundless, to a point. While you can build anything you dream of, you’re still constrained by the features programmed into the game. Official updates usually add lots of great new content, but there’s only one or two of those a year. Thankfully, you can look to the many talented developers in the community, as the sea of Minecraft mods is truly endless.

Whether you’re looking for small quality-of-life improvements, new machines to build, or even whole new dimensions, you can find a mod that will suit your needs. We’ve dived into the modding scene and picked out the best Minecraft mods that will have you playing like it was a whole new game.

If you want some interesting worlds for trying out these mods then check out the best Minecraft seeds for something cool.

JourneyMap

When you’ve spent a lot of time in your Minecraft world, it can start to feel like a second home, but with massive worlds to explore with all sorts of strange things to discover, it can be hard to keep track of everything from memory alone. This is where minimap mods come in. JourneyMap is the best choice at the moment, as it lets you see a full map of the entirety of the world you’ve explored. On top of that, you can mark locations with waypoints so you never get lost again.

Just Enough Items

If you’re going to get into modding, then there are a selection of mods that are must-haves to make your life easier. Optifine is a famous one that gives you loads of optimization options, helping your game run smoother on low-spec PCs. However, Just Enough Items is far more important, as it gives you an easy overview of the likely hundreds of new blocks and items all of your mods have added. Not only that, but it lets you view the crafting recipes and uses for everything – it’s an essential tool.

Pixelmon Generations

So you like Minecraft, but you also like Pokémon, what if the two could somehow intersect? If this idea appeals to you, then install Pixelmon Generations immediately. This adds the entire Pokédex into Minecraft where you can craft Pokéballs, catch Pokémon, challenge gyms and do much more. Plus, the team behind it is dedicated to regularly updating the mod, so whenever a new Pokémon generation drops, you can be sure they’ll be added quickly.

Cobblemon

Pixelmon is great and has been around for a long time, but due to multiple teams working on it over many years, it can be a bit loose and inconsistent – both in terms of Pokémon designs and mechanics. Cobblemon is a new mod that seeks to create the entire Pokédex entirely in a Minecraft-friendly style, with all the bells and whistles being added over time. If you’re not a fan of Pixelmon but still want more Pokémon in your Minecraft, this might be the mod for you.

Vault Hunters

Exploring and looting caves and dungeons in Minecraft is pretty dull. Even the invincible Warden boss stops being scary once you learn how to handle it. If you want a much more thrilling adventure, then Vault Hunters will keep you going for ages. This ramps up the default difficulty of the game and allows you to enter procedurally generated dungeons with rare loot, swarms of enemies, and difficult bosses. It has that “one more run” quality that all good roguelikes have, and will put even the most skilled fighters to the test.

GalactiCraft

Being able to go to space improves any game, and this mod has been letting players do that for years. Advanced Rocketry is a bit more in-depth with the rocket building, but if you just want to explore other worlds then GalactiCraft is your best bet. Explore strange new worlds, meet and trade with alien villagers, and establish an intergalactic empire made of lovely blocks.

Project E

A reboot of the classic Equivalent Exchange mods, Project E lets you live out a power fantasy of being able to generate diamonds from thin air. It nails the sense of progression as you turn your first few diamonds into a Philosopher’s Stone which you can then use to slowly grow your empire until you’re flying around kitted out with Red Matter as a virtual God of your world.

Twilight Forest

Twilight Forest is one of the few mods from the early days of Minecraft modding that still has a team actively working on it, so it’s no wonder it’s grown into one of the best and most expansive mods of all time. Bosses, ores, wood, biomes, dungeons, you name it, Twilight Forest has it. If you want the kind of mod you can explore forever, this is the one you need to install.

Applied Energistics 2

Big words in a mod title can only mean one thing, complex machines. If you’ve ever seen a computer storage system in Minecraft, then this is likely the mod it was from. Using a mixture of technology, botany, and even a little alchemy, Applied Energistics will mean you never have to use chests again. Instead, you can turn all your blocks and items into data all stored on a central server and accessible from anywhere. It’s what we imagine the world will be like when we finally reach 9G wireless connections.

Create

While lots of mods add new technology, most of those consist of placing down a single block that will do all the work for you. Create is a little more chaotic, but a lot cooler. Rather than a single block, every machine is a massive series of cogs, wheels, conveyors, pipes, and so much more. You can even make full-sized train networks that perform all sorts of different jobs. If you’ve ever wanted to make a Steampunk world with factories producing wonders big and small, this is the perfect mod for you.

Storage Drawers

Storing the masses of items you’ll gather in any Minecraft world – let alone a modded one – is a tall task, and players have developed all sorts of storage systems. However, if you want an option that is both practical and cool-looking, Storage Drawers is the option for you. With loads of flexibility, these drawers can store thousands of items, with you being able to give and take from them with a few simple clicks. There are no inventory screens to mess around with, making it quick and simple – plus, having a massive wall of drawers all displaying items looks fantastic.

Croptopia

Setting up a farm in your Minecraft world is something of a "set it and forget it" arrangement. Unless you're making a point of diversifying your Minecraft diet, then you'll likely just have a pen of cows that you occasionally slaughter for a stack of meat. Croptopia makes farming a more engaging part of the game, adding 58 new ground crops, 26 new tree crops, and over 250 recipes of things you can cook.

Oh The Biomes You'll Go

For the longest time, Biome O' Plenty was the only Minecraft biome mod worthwhile, but with the change to world generation in the Caves & Cliffs update comes the opportunity for much grander and wilder biomes than what O' Plenty ever provided.

Enter Oh The Biomes You'll Go, with a name that promises adventure and new biomes that deliver. Whether you want colorful flow forests, towering hot springs, or wild mountains, OTBYG is the new premier biome mod.

Macaw's Collection

Macaw has made several mods over the years that add great new aesthetics to your world, and it's up to you which ones you want to include. With this collection you can add more realistic roofs, doors, windows, bridges, and all sorts of furniture to your world, giving you more building options for your grandest creations.

Alex's Mobs

Minecraft updates are gradually adding official versions of more and more animals, but this is the perfect mod if you want all of them added at once. It's not just real animals either, plenty of fantasy creatures are added with Alex's Mobs like a centipede that will attack you in caves or a drop bear that hangs out in The Nether. It may be terrifying, but it's worth it for a more lively world.

Tinkers Construct

Tinkers is a pretty old mod by this point, but it's still one of the best mods for tools out there. Once again you'll be building some simple structures to forge the parts of tools out of different materials. All of these materials give you modifiers to the tool you eventually craft, and you can level it up by using it to add further modifiers or increase its stats. No mod goes this in-depth when it comes to tool crafting, so it's worth a try.

Chisel

Minecraft is a game of aesthetics, and when you’re building a giant castle wall, having it all be one repeated texture can look pretty dull. You can implement other types of blocks to mix it up, but the Chisel mod gives you dozens of variations on the same block. With this, you can make even something as simple as a plain wooden floor look more interesting just by changing up the patterns on the titles.

Mekanism

Another great tech mod for Minecraft, Mekanism takes what older mods like IndustrialCraft and BuildCraft started and pumps up the complexity to ridiculous degrees. Although it isn’t as visually flashy as something like Create, you can string together machines to automate just about every process in Minecraft.

Nova Prospekt Armory

A new mod that works off of Immersive Engineering, this lets you craft some of the weapons and vehicles from the Half-Life games. These include some standard guns like the AK-47, but also more creative things like Gluon Gun and the Tau Cannon.

No Cubes

Well, we’ve officially done it, Minecraft mods have gotten so ridiculous there is now one that entirely removes the core premise of Minecraft. The block-based world is now gone and everything has been awkwardly smoothed over. It looks extremely weird and probably isn’t worth playing past the novelty wearing off, but it’s cool to see what your beloved worlds look like with this mod installed.