Are you looking for the best Minecraft mods?
Good news! You can find a list of the best Java mods right here.
With a strong modding community, there are thousands of mods you can explore to improve your Minecraft experience significantly.
With how easy it is to set one up and play, you’re sorely missing out if you’re stubbornly sticking with just the vanilla game.
From performance-optimizing mods to mods that can build massive structures in mere minutes, installing Minecraft mods will serve you more than hundreds of hours of gameplay – if not more!
Free up your tab space; here are 35 of the best Minecraft mods in 2023.
Just Enough Items is a Minecraft mod that adds a comprehensive and user-friendly interface that allows players to view item recipes in-game. In addition, players can easily search for all items and blocks available – Vanilla or modded Minecraft.
When you select an item or block, the mod will display all the different ways it can be crafted and which materials are needed for each recipe. The mod is super helpful for players who have just started playing Minecraft or those exploring new mods and modpacks.
Optifine is one of the most beloved performance-enhancing mods in the entire Minecraft community. It’s a mod that renders stunning graphical visualizations to the Overworld while also improving the FPS rates of most hardware by up to 200%.
Optifine has three editions: Ultra, Standard, and Light. OptiFine Ultra focuses on improving FPS; Standard is the preferred option if you’re running multiple mods at once, and Light is the better option if you have a low-specs laptop.
If you were to install just one mod off the list — Optifine would be one I’d pick in a heartbeat. From its HD textures, smooth lighting, and frame rate doubling, there are too many benefits you can get from this mod, making it one of my favorite Minecraft mods to date.
If you often get lost in Minecraft, this map can be a great mod to have in your arsenal. It acts as an internal compass, allowing you to track the places you’ve been to as you chart the world in real time through a map. This allows you to gain the confidence to explore far without the fear of never making it back to your home base.
If you get lost more times than you can count, this is one of the best mods to own. You can access this modded map through a full screen or mini-screen in-game, or through a website instead.
Mouse Tweaks is a simple Minecraft mod that speeds up crafting. In vanilla Minecraft, you’re often stuck clicking and dragging one block at a time when crafting an item.
With this mod, however, you’ll get two new LMB dragging mechanics and the ability to use a scroll wheel to quickly move items. Another great perk is the ability to move items into another inventory by just holding your LMB.
Mouse Tweaks is a must-install for any Minecraft player. It’s essentially a QoL improvement that speeds up the process of getting your items from your inventory. You’ll have to do some slight configurations to get started, but it’s all easy to do and laid out in their mod install home page.
AppleSkin is an incredibly useful mod for Minecraft players, whether in a base game or a modded Minecraft game. This mod allows you to see your hunger and saturation levels, which can be helpful when you’re trying to ration food as you traverse through jungles and caves in your Minecraft world.
The way this Minecraft mod works is it visualizes how much hunger will get restored as you hold a food item. This removes the need for you to memorize the restoration figure of food items, which is immensely helpful in this game where scores of food items exist!
With various draw sizes, the Storage Drawers mod adds new functional yet aesthetic storage solutions. Now, you can replace your chest and item frame storage rooms with easy-to-reach drawers, which you can organize by item.
There’s no slotted inventory for this mod; instead, it works on a click base system. For full details, visit the CurseForge link through the download button. To summarise, right clicks insert items into the draw while left-clicking removes items.
Some nifty features include a bar that indicates how full a storage drawer is, a storage block controller, and different-sized drawers, such as half or full drawers.
This Minecraft mod adds a variety of new chest types to the game. There are storage solutions for all players, from the measly copper chest to the massive crystal shucker chest. The mod includes 17 new chest types, each with a unique storage capacity. The mod also upgrades chests, such as locking your chest so other players can’t open it.
What’s really cool is that some chests have added functionalities. For example, the first chest will compost nearby items. In addition, the crystal chest allows players to see the items inside without opening the chest.
Simple yet effective, the Clumps mod groups together XP orbs for less lag and to save time. XP orbs clump together into one item, which reduces lag within your Minecraft world, especially for players with lower-end computers. Additionally, players absorb the clump immediately, so there are no more floating orbs around.
This mod is created for those Survival players with XP farms, such as mob grinders.
Applied Energistics is a Minecraft mod that adds various unique features to the game centered around energy and transferring energy. It completely overhauls the mechanics of Minecraft and is available for Fabric and Forge.
Some highlights include automation tools, robust transportation systems for signals, items, and fluids, and new decorative blocks. In addition, the mod saves time as you’ll no longer need to run between bases to collect different items or carry around shulker blocks.
Have you been looking for a realistic tech mod for Minecraft? Immersive Engineering is a mod that adds new tech and features to Minecraft without creating sci-fi-looking pipes that glow. Instead, you’ll find blocks such as power lines, crushers, rotating wheels, and excavators.
Additionally, power generation items such as waterwheels, windmills, and even biodiesel have been added. And don’t worry if it all sounds confusing; the mod includes a manual for all new players that act as in-game documentation.
If you’re looking for enhanced vanilla gameplay, then you should definitely download this Minecraft mod. Quark adds a range of new blocks, items, and mechanics to your gameplay, allowing players to experience a more immersive Minecraft world.
The mod includes new decor blocks, such as chiseled vertical slabs, and new farming and fishing techniques, like using bait or mutating crops. It also adds new adventure experiences, such as ruins, new biomes, and weather effects.
The Thermal Foundation mod is the ‘base game’ for the Thermal Series – a collection of mods that aims to create a new thermally-powered Minecraft world. With over 96 million downloads, the Thermal Foundation mod is the foundation and start to entering the Thermal Series.
Other mods in the series include:
- Thermal Cultivation for farming and foods
- Thermal dynamics for transportation
- Thermal expansion for machinery and industry (the original mod)
- Thermal Innovations for advanced power tools and gadgets
- And more!
Do the concepts of natural magic and tech mods interest you? If yes, then Botania is a Minecraft mod that’ll beautify your Minecraft world in a snap. This Minecraft mod boasts over 100 different items that revolve around the creation of 16 new magical flowers and uniquely powered contraptions using the power of the earth, or Mana, as they call it.
Botania works best as a standalone mod, but it can handle working in conjunction with other mods as well. The items are themed to encourage automation and the creation of fun contraptions and breathtaking gardens, which is a heck of a lot of fun for new players and oldies alike.
Cooking for Blockheads is a modern mod that allows players to create and build a fully functional kitchen within Minecraft. From fridges to stoves to sinks, the mod has everything you need to enhance food and cooking within the game. Imagine a modern build with a fully fitted kitchen or opening a restaurant on a Minecraft Server for your friends.
It includes a recipe book that teaches you new recipes and all the food items you can craft. In addition, the mod adds a new aspect to the game with unique ingredients, cooking methods, and utensils.
Kitchens are fully modular, allowing players to upgrade and increase their kitchen size as needed. From cooking on the stove to creating an endless water supply with the sink, there’s a lot you can do with this mod, and it deserves to be on our list of best Minecraft mods.
If you’ve journeyed across various Minecraft worlds and stepped into most of the common biomes, there’s nothing more satisfying than stepping foot into a brand new world.
This is where Biomes O Plenty comes in as a must-have mod for Minecraft players. This mod adds over 50 new biomes ranging from the Alps and Coniferous Forest to a land filled with Cherry Blossoms. And if you think new additions are limited to the Overworld — think again! The Nether has a brand new aesthetic rehaul too.
Giving you complete control over the decorative aspects of your game, Chisels and Bits allows players to design and use new decorative items. The mod lets players chisel away without adding much to the base game and craft blocks such as sloping roofs, new fences, and even cobblestone paths.
Use the chisel, wrench, or templates to enhance your building style by creating new columns and stairs and mixing and matching bits in Minecraft.
For more information on this mod, you can find the wiki here.
Have you ever wanted to jump around your world without needing a nether hub or elytra? Then check out the Waystones mod. It allows players to craft Waystones to travel to any other Waystone in your world. Players have various options for traveling through their world – using existing Waystones or through a Warp Scroll.
It’s perfect for players who prefer not to use the ‘/warp’ or ‘/home’ commands.
Players can either craft Waystones or find the naturally generated structures within the world. The mod is perfect for RPG players or multiplayer worlds like servers or LAN worlds. Lastly, an additional toggle allows players to warp without any items on them.
The Twilight Forest mod is another fantastic mod that enables players to transport into the twilight realm. There, you’ll find yourself in a heavily forested world with new dungeons, bosses, items, and mobs.
In this world, your clock is always frozen before sunset. Despite the dark and gloomy setting, most hostile mobs only spawn in dungeons and caves below the surface, and the Overworld is generally a safe place to explore.
However, if you want to get the best loot, you’ll have to venture right at the heart of danger. Are you up for the challenge?
Creating a complex Ender Storage system, these chests connect based on color patterns. So instead of having one universal Ender Chest, you can create a system for storing different blocks and items sorted by color-coding your chests.
There are three types of storage:
- EnderChest counterpart
- EnderPouches
- Ender Tanks
EnderPouches are the mobile version of the new color-coded chests, while EnderTanks are specifically for fluids. In addition, the chests span across dimensions and create a new ideal way to transport items long distances.
Normally, it can take up to a minute or two to chop down a tree in vanilla Minecraft.
With the Fast Leaf Decay mod, chopping down one section of the tree bark causes the entire tree to fall and leave behind resources.
Chopping down trees is a fairly time-consuming task, especially if you have a lot of trees you have to clear out.
If you want to speed things up, this Fast Leaf Decay mod is a great mod to save you minutes and get you straight into building stuff.
A sister mod to Explorer’s Compass, this mod adds one utility item to the game – Nature’s Compass. The item allows the player to find specific biomes within the world without using the ‘/locate’ cheat. It can even help you find cave biomes while mining.
You’ll open the biome searcher user interface by right-clicking the compass while equipt. There, you can select and read up about a biome. Shift-right-click will reset the compass and allow you to search for another biome. Lastly, the mod is compatible with all registered biomes, which means it’ll search for both vanilla and modded biomes.
Crafting the compass is simple. The recipe requires a compass, four saplings, and four logs. The utility is perfect for explorers or builders looking for specific materials for their latest projects.
The aim of this mod is to improve the current advancement structure in the game. Players can now easily track their progress, set custom goals and objectives, and enjoy a more rewarding and satisfying Minecraft gameplay experience.
The mod also overhauls the user interface, adding new icons and visual cues. It also adds new advancements such as “catch a fish in a bucket” or “reach the Nether.” This mod is for you if you’re looking for a more guided experience.
Like VeinMiner, the Ore Excavation mod allows players to mine resource veins and trees in one go. It’s a mod that saves players time and is perfect for players that need lots of wood for buildings and structures. It even allows for mass harvesting!
The mod is flexible with multiple configurations, such as excavation distances, speeds, and item durability costs. Lastly, it has a handy undo command in case you make a mistake during your mining frenzy.
Recently updated for Minecraft 1.19, Mystical Agriculture is a Minecraft mod similar to Botania. However, the most significant difference is that the mod is centered around growing resources through crops! With this mod, plants grow essence which can then be crafted into materials, tools, and even mob drops.
With an in-game guide, it’s easy to get started. Start mining for Prosperity and Inferium ore to create seeds and grow your resources. With items such as the altar and soul jars, Mystical Agriculture adds a whole new layer of magic to the game, which you won’t want to miss.
Simple yet effective, the Enchantment Descriptions mod adds descriptions to enchanted tools, items, and swords. It’s a lightweight mod that supports both fabric and forge.
With over 60 million downloads, Enchantment Descriptions is one of the best Minecraft mods for Minecraft 1.19.
This mod created by SonarSonic has over 55 million downloads and adds a new way to build wireless energy networks. Create custom networks to manage the flow of power throughout your Minecraft world. The mod aims to decrease lag and save time by removing pipes and wireless that other tech mods introduce.
One of the most significant features of this mod is that energy can be transferred across dimensions, allowing players to automate blocks throughout the game without creating new systems. Additionally, players can organize the priority of different flows in their network, allowing for more complex energy systems.
Of course, this mod would work best if you had other tech mods installed which require energy to automate processes.
Have you ever wanted furniture in your game that isn’t made out of stairs and signs? That’s precisely what MrCrayfish’s Furniture mod does. Players can craft furniture, including sofas, chairs, tables, cabinets, refrigerators, and ovens. In addition, are a variety of new decorative items added to the game, such as lamps, plants, washing machines, and toilets.
What’s great about this mod is the interactivity added to the game. Players can now sit on chairs, watch TV, cook food in an oven, and even flush toilets.
Comforts is a simple yet handy mod that adds sleeping bags and hammocks to the game. It’s perfect for adventurers as you’ll no longer need to take a bed with you on your journey. Sleeping bags can be crafted with wool, leather, and hammocks with sticks and string. These sleeping solutions are perfect for lying under the stars or under a tree.
The mod also adds a range of different sleeping bag and hammock textures, allowing players to customize their game.
Leading cows to a pen with wheat can be tedious, especially over a long distance. The same can be said for pushing them into Minecraft. However, with Carry On, players can pick up blocks and entities by simply right-clicking. There is also a ton of customisability to the game, where players can adjust the carrying speed, disable different blocks from being picked up, and easily change the key bindings.
Another mod for the adventurous souls out there is Xaero’s Minimap which adds a customizable minimap to the game’s user interface. The map can be displayed in different positions on the screen and resized to fit different screen resolutions. Players can even choose which information is displayed, such as coordinates, biomes, and waypoints.
With Xaero’s minimap, players can easily navigate underground cave systems and mark important locations. In addition, it adds a whole new, customizable, efficient way to explore your Minecraft world.
Losing your stuff in Minecraft is a miserable, yet reasonable punishment. But what if a mod prevents you from losing your items after death by stashing them in a grave instead?
That’s exactly what you get when you install the Corail Tombstone mod. With it, you’ll be able to place decorative graves that can hold your stuff when you respawn back to the world after death.
Aside from that, other cool perks are available. Souls can haunt the grave and must wait to be freed from their eternal damnation. A Grave Guardian can also spawn by the decorative grave and attack hostile creatures and trade with players.
Macaw’s Bridges
This mod adds a variety of bridge types and materials to the game, such as wooden, stone, sandstone, and iron bridges. Players can choose from various designs and sizes, and with its user-friendly building mechanics, the only limitation is your imagination. The mod even includes various building tools to make the building process more manageable.
Some gameplay mechanics added to the game is the option to prevent players from falling off the bridge or setting up a toll gate. That way, other players on your server have to pay a toll, making it a perfect way to collect resources.
The beauty of Minecraft is the endless amount of things you can create. With this Create mod, you’ll be able to make much more things to tinker around with and automate. It enables players to engineer mechanisms and contraptions using a range of cogwheels and gears. If you’ve ever wondered how a circle item would work in Minecraft, the Create mod introduces them for players to enjoy.
Various other contraptions such as pulleys, conveyor belts, gearboxes, and levers also get introduced with this game mod — allowing you to develop weird and wacky new creations that would’ve otherwise been impossible to build.
Welcome to another ‘Vanilla Minecraft with a twist’ mod. The Supplementaries mod adds content to the game, filling up gameplay gaps that Minecraft is missing. For example, the mod introduces jars, a new way to store liquids within the game instead of buckets in a chest.
The mod doesn’t replace or change your vanilla Minecraft gameplay. Still, it complements the game by adding items such as Redstone, functional and decorative blocks.
Farmer’s Delight
Put on your straw hat and craft that netherite hoe, as Farmer’s Delight is the perfect mod for those that love games such as Stardew Valley. The mod enhances the game’s farming and cooking experiences by adding complex farming and cooking systems.
Players can now grow a variety of new crops, such as rice, quinoa, and barley, and use them for cooking delicious new recipes such as rice balls, teas, and cider. Another significant aspect of the mod is the tools that it adds to the game. These make farming so much easier, including sprinklers, new composters, and crop harvesters.
How to Install Minecraft Mods?
One mistake a lot of new Minecraft players tend to make is forgetting to download Minecraft Forge before downloading the mods. You can’t play if you don’t accomplish this step.
Here are the steps to download Forge.
- Install the latest version of Minecraft Forge on your PC.
- Once you’re finished installing, restart your PC.
- Open the Minecraft launcher. In the drop-down menu, you can now see Forge. Click on it, then press Play.
- Now every time you boot up Minecraft with Forge, you’ll be able to play any installed mods with it. Neat!
Once Forge is finally installed and set up, here’s how you can play mods in Minecraft Java Edition.
- Find your desired mod in MC mod and modpack sites like CurseForge and download it. (The above MC mods are guaranteed to work as long as they’re running on the same version as Minecraft)
- After you’ve downloaded your mod, put it in a “Mods” folder that Forge created upon installation. You may also create a “New Folder” and place your mod there instead.
- Boot up the Minecraft launcher and Forge at the same time. Then, in the launcher, click the “Mods” option from the main menu.
- Click “Open mods folder.” You’ll then be redirected to the “Mods” folder Forge made.
- For Windows users, find the mod file you downloaded using the “Window’s File Explorer”. Apple users should use the Mac’s Finder. Once found, put them in the Forge mods folder.
- Run the game with Forge in the background. Then, click the “Mods” menu on the title screen of Minecraft Java Edition. You should now see your installed mods!
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