Minecraft Chase the Skies and Vibrant Visuals are here, changing the entire game

Today marks not one, but two huge moments for Minecraft. Firstly, the newest update, Chase the Skies, is here, offering more ways to traverse your worlds with relative ease. Secondly, and in my eyes more importantly, is the arrival of Vibrant Visuals. Starting now, your servers can look better than they ever have in Minecraft, with an array of graphical enhancements that don't impede on the visual style, a decade after launch. If you've been waiting for the perfect excuse to jump back in, this is it.

With Vibrant Visuals, Mojang is finally bringing some modern enhancements to Minecraft's graphics. Shadows are cast on individual blocks by the sun. Water fully reflects the landscape around it. Clouds stretch across the sky further than ever before. The game even has more than 3,000 new textures, which help all of the new effects work properly. Mojang's goal is to naturally evolve the way one of the best sandbox games looks, and now you can try it for yourself.

As a cosmetic update, it's vital to note that Vibrant Visuals will have no impact on gameplay. Existing lighting mechanics like when hostile mobs burn, crop growth, mob farms, and daylight detectors will all work exactly as they did before. This also means you can still play with others who don't have Vibrant Visuals enabled - it won't impede the experience in any way.

You should also know Mojang is initially only launching Vibrant Visuals in Minecraft Bedrock Edition. A Java Edition will follow, though, as Mojang says "it will take time for us to get this right - but it's time we want to spend."

Now we come to Chase the Skies, Minecraft's newest game drop that's also available today. The highlight here is definitely the happy ghast, a new mob you can tame to float around your world. You need to head to the Nether, collect the dried ghast block, and then turn it into a ghastling and rear it, but all that work will definitely pay off.

Chase the Skies also comes with the player locator bar. This tool will show you where your friends are with colored dots, and even has an arrow to give you their elevation as well. Leads also have a new recipe, now only requiring string. You can also leash multiple mobs together at once, and use the item with your new happy ghast to attach a boat underneath it as well.

You can even craft saddles with just three leather and one iron ingot, meaning you'll never lose that horse again. If you want to get the saddle back, though, all you need to do is use shears, easy as you like.

Both Minecraft Chase the Skies and Vibrant Visuals are live in the game right now.

Don't forget to spruce up how the game looks with the best Minecraft texture packs available now. Otherwise, the best Minecraft mods can completely change how it plays.

You can follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides. We've also got a vibrant community Discord server, where you can chat about this story with members of the team and fellow readers.