Vibrant Visuals is a visual graphics upgrade that will transform the way players experience Minecraft. Initially releasing for Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, it is our developer’s vision for what Minecraft looks like with improved visual elements such as directional lighting, volumetric fog, and more.

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Let's talk about water in Vibrant Visuals!

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Vibrant Visuals changes how water looks and reflects its surroundings! Water is now reflective and reacts differently to the sun light. 

We'd love to hear your feedback on the water! What do you think? 
 

  • Do you like the look of the water? Is it too reflective or not reflective enough? 
  • How can it be improved? 
  • What would you like to see? 

 

To test these features you will need to enable “previews” on compatible Minecraft: Bedrock Edition devices by following the instructions at aka.ms/PreviewFAQ

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41 Comments

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  • 33
    Registered User commented
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    Underwater reflections are too aggressive and dulls the blocks. During the day you can barely identify what blocks you're looking at when swimming underwater. It's a very unpleasant experience imo

  • 25
    Registered User commented
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    First thing I thought of was the caustics of the water on blocks undearneath could have a more blue-ish tone. Cause right now it feels sort of easy to mistake it for a magma block or something else.

  • 57
    Registered User commented
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    Flowing water is almost too transparent. As you can see in the example below, it is barely visible compared to water in rivers and ponds.

  • 22
    Registered User commented
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    Add animations giving life to seas, lakes, splashes, waterfalls, and much more.

  • 19
    Registered User commented
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    the caustics being the exact same texture repeated over and over again doesn't look great. I think either making it more subtle, increasing the size of the texture to make it more gradual and less dense, or adding random rotation variation akin to grass and sand would help it pop out more, without feeling as obstructive.

  • 24
    Registered User commented
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    Underwater visibility needs to be improved. Changes might also be made to seaweed LOD optimization, as distant strands appear only as silhouetted columns while underwater.

  • 4
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    Water's reflectivity makes it difficult to see under the surface at all. I tested in a mangrove swamp, and unless I was looking straight down at it, the water's surface was entirely opaque (and took on a pale blue color). Fish and similar underwater features are not visible, even with reflections turned off. This wasn't true in every environment, but I do think reducing the reflectivity could be helpful across the board.

  • 14
    Registered User commented
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    I am loving vibrant visuals so far, I have always wished for something like this to come to bedrock console editions for a long time now, as we never had access to shaders in the past. However in terms of water and its reflections there as some improvements and other people may like to see:

    1) Improve visibility underwater and above - right now looking underwater or above the oceans is too dark and hazy, you cannot see what is in front of you at all, this was particularly disappointing when I wanted to see how the coral will look, however to just looked very murky. 

    2) Underwater Reflection Textures- I love the idea of these, however they look quite messy at the moment. the shift from deep water and shallow water (which has the reflection textures) is too aggressive. I recommend if there was a transition from the deep water to shallow, this could be done by the brightness of the textures gradually increasing. Also the fact that they all have the same animation looks odd as water is usual organic in the way it moves. Making different animations would be better. 

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    I love how this water looks!

     

  • 9
    Registered User commented
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    The water Caustics are too strong/visible. Their transparency should be toned up and they should still be present, but less visible.

  • 5
    Registered User commented
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    I feel like the design choices are a bit too messy, large bodies of water have zero visibility underwater. Whatever is underwater is almost opaque looking from above water lakes or rivers. Water streams are way too transparent and its hard to tell apart unless you get close to it and have the reflections indicate its there. If these two were flipped, it would be way better in my opinion.

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    Under water reflections only affect the tops of the blocks. This makes sense in the case that the block cast a shadow but in other cases where the face of the block is exposed to the light source the reflections from the water surface should affect the side of the block.

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    The water is WAY too dark near the surface of anything, I wouldn't mind if it was dark when it was really deep in the water but you can't see anything in it, I would also like the water effect overlay a bit deeper but in a weaker tone.

  • 9
    Registered User commented
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    The water needs to have a bit more blue added back - as well as the hue changes between biomes.

    Visibility needs greatly increasing underwater.

    Water turns milky white towards the edges of a body of water. It looks terrible - please remove this

  • 3
    Registered User commented
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    I think underwater it looks too foggy and dark; that's why blocks are hard to identify, and the flowing water inside caves has a weird bluish glow. Also, when you are inside flowing water or water in general, you won't be able to see the outside world. 

  • 3
    Registered User commented
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    Cave water looks pretty good and murky on top, sometimes weird and glassy when it's falling water with a blue artifact that comes from it maybe unintentionally but going into it currently flashes an intense blue color out of nowhere, I'd like to see a refactoring of whether water has sky or light access, therefore it's way darker in color and you can get an almost abyssal effect that makes things like glow squids look like stars or anglers the way they glow through it.

  • 3
    Registered User commented
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    The water texture should have variance on the surface instead of the same texture being repeated. Also add a subtle wave animation. 

  • 2
    Registered User commented
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    The caustics aren't too strong when seeming them from the surface, they could still be turned down a bit. However, viewing the caustics while underwater, the strength is way too high. You could confuse every block for magma blocks. 

  • 4
    Registered User commented
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    1: Please add a water reflectivity slider. I believe the comments of some who say the water reflectivity makes it too hard to see underwater are actually unable to see due to fog rendering and general poor underwater visibility. Regardless, I'm sure many would love to be able to turn it down for maximum visibility during some or most gameplay, but also to be able to turn it up for ambiance and screenshots. I, personally, would DESPERATELY want to be able to take screenshots with fully reflective water.

    2: Please add a caustic brightness slider in the options. This would solve many people's issues with the caustics outright, without having to impact the experience of other players.

    3: Please change water caustics to darken as you get deeper. This is more realistic and aesthetic, but it would also dramatically improve visibility because, once water darkness has been improved, the blocks and the caustics will fade in tandem, keeping the bright contrast of the caustics from making blocks indistinguishable.

    4: Please make caustics dimmer under flowing water, depending on the flowing water height. Having bright caustics under the very edge of a water flow is strange, unrealistic, and causes visibility issues. I would want them not to be full strength until there are 2 or three water blocks above them. That said, some players may prefer to have waterlogged blocks have the same caustic brightness as a full water block (and I assume it would be easier to code). I would have to see the difference to know what I'd prefer, honestly.

    5: As others have said, the texture of the caustics needs improvement. The repetition feels harsh and out of place.

  • 2
    Registered User commented
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    Another user Commented about the water looking milky white at the edges of water and I agree it looks really bad as shown by the screen shot.

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    I feel like the water is looking good in the latest snapshot. However, one thing that needs to be done... The water looks milky white towards the edges and it looks horrible - especially underground and in dark areas.

    To fix this, I would recommend that instead of fading to a milky white, it is faded to the original water texture's blue hue. I would also add a bit more transparency to this transition - but the first point is the most important!

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    I think they're really great, but the screen-space reflections seem to fall apart when viewed from angles around 15-75° below the horizon. This effect is exaggerated when viewed:

    • from high altitudes
    • on wider monitors
    • on higher FOV settings

    My current settings are 3440x1440, 110° field of view, max reflections, max shadow quality, max reflections, 24 Chunk render distance, and No Fog. Hope this somehow helps!

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    Add physics

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    the light on the water and the reflections are my fav part of vibrant visuals!

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    yup, i can see the milky visual and when poured from a bucket gets almost invisable, i like it being more clear like in that screen shot someone posted but i want to make sure it is visible. 

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    I play on MC Preview on PS4. I think It's not reflective enough and I would love to see the tiniest bit more layers. BUT I think that, agreeing with the oldest comment, the underwater reflection could be reduced.

     

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    too glossy

     

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    The new water is so good that every mob in my Minecraft world wants to drown in it, even the endermen keep going in it (3 horses and 2 donkeys of mine drowned please nerf the water or my donkeys will keep drowning in it because it's too good looking)

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    The edges of the screen-space reflections are really annoying, even with the fade out they have. They look good in stills, but panning the camera around and seeing reflections disappear and pop in is distracting and immersion-breaking, even with the highest reflection quality and various FOV settings.

    To the developers' credit, the SSR gets closer to the edge of the screen and has a less noticeable fade than most if not all SSR in Java shaders that I've seen, but I think there is still some improvement to be made. If possible, more content than that which is visible on the screen should be rendered so that the edge of the SSR is beyond the viewable FOV, which would look much more seamless. I think this should at least apply to higher reflection quality settings, since a lot of people probably don't mind or notice and I would imagine that it could affect performance. 

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    I loved the vibrant visuals so far. It's nice to have a native visual like this. I think it will need some refinements, though. Like the surface of the water inside caves (I frequently, mistake the water surface texture for solid stones). also the underwater bright (that in the real world comes from the small waves on the surface) could actually work, like having a render engine that emulates the wavering... and not just a image texture (also, I think that the first problem could be mitigated by this feature).