get ready because minecraft is about to
get
sexy no not like that
you've got a nice gaming computer but
minecraft
still looks like a low end game from the
90s in this episode i'm going to show
you
everything you need to know to turn this
into this
oh and i'll show you how to do it
absolutely free stick around to the end
of the video
where i'll compare the free resource
packs both with
and without shaders
[Music]
members of our fleet get behind the
scenes access to our show
including all the embarrassing outtakes
those who have been with us a while will
remember way back in studio d
when i was nearly brought to tears after
a viewer donated an nvidia quadro
rtx 6000 gpu for our broadcast rig
and here i am a couple years on and
still loving how that card is able to
greatly accelerate the video production
workflow here at the studio
but we've also been producing some
minecraft gaming videos as of late
and it looks like this feels like we're
seriously under utilizing the power of
our system and quite frankly i'd love
the game to look better
so let's do it this video is brought to
you by ameridroid.com
you can build your very own self-hosted
minecraft server with a super cheap
single board computer so check out
ameridroid.com
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sales and support visit ameridroid.com
for this free visual upgrade we're going
to need three things
a modded client a shader pack and a
resource pack a
shader pack controls the way light is
handled in minecraft and how
shadows are cast a resource pack
replaces the sounds and textures within
the game
the actual artwork that makes up each
and every block
sometimes people call resource packs
texture packs
which isn't quite wrong but since
resource packs can also include new
sounds and music it's not quite accurate
either
to help us understand the difference
between shader packs and resource packs
let's take a look at what some of the
blocks look like so
here we are in the default minecraft
installation which is often referred to
as vanilla since that's about as plain
as it gets
now let's look at the same scene but
this time with a shader pack enabled
as you can see the sun is casting
shadows and the world generally feels a
lot more realistic
one of the more impressive changes
shaders improve is
a genuine realism to the water and this
of course
has a lot to do with how light reflects
off the water
and how water refracts the light shaders
make the light much more realistic
and that causes blocks beneath the
surface to have an authentic
rippling look remember shaders affect
light
and shadows let's turn off the shaders
and return to vanilla
take in this scene again and see how
flat everything looks the textures are
16 pixels squared
which gives minecraft a really pixel art
style appearance but
we can replace those low resolution
textures with a resource pack
the cobblestone looks much more
realistic and loses that pixelated boxy
texture look
here i'm looking at a texture pack that
is 128 pixels squared
which means a single face of this
cobblestone which
used to be just 16 by 16 pixels
stretched out in vanilla
it's now 128 by 128 pixels
while you look for resource packs keep
in mind that these will be labeled as
32x 64x 128x
1024x and so on now the number is a
reference to the resolution of the
textures
so the higher the resolution the more
impact it could have on your game's
performance
so if your computer isn't the best of
the best you might try starting with a
lower resolution pack
say 128x or even 256x
a more powerful rig like mine can handle
1024x with
no performance impact at all for the
most part free resource packs will be of
a lower resolution with
higher resolution versions of the same
pack available for a modest fee
a lot of them such as patrick's stratum
or mcea
offer lower resolution versions for free
which may be exactly what you need but
then you have the option to upgrade
later if you'd like
my suggestion is that you spend
absolutely nothing
now hear me out because artists and
coders deserve to get paid
simply start with the free ones to see
how your system handles it
free in this case does not mean crippled
in any way
it's not going to have ads or hidden
features
it's just that you get a lower
resolution texture pack
better than vanilla but you could still
get better if you wanted to pay
astonishingly resource packs can be as
high as
10 24 pixels resolution with some
being even higher than that so we've now
seen the difference between
a shader and a resource pack so let's
combine both
and see how that affects the look of
when we come back i'm going to show you
how to install
all the free stuff that you need to make
your minecraft look
absolutely beautiful stick around
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category5 you may have heard of
modding your minecraft client don't let
that scare you we just need to install a
java program called optifine and this
essentially makes it so minecraft
supports hd textures and shaders
download this from optifine.net if
you're wondering why i'm suggesting
installing optifine
first even though minecraft vanilla
supports resource packs out of the box
it's because of some of the extra
features optifine brings
even to resource packs perhaps reddit
user
the great argorath said it best in
response to this question
because optifine includes features like
custom entity models
and connected textures that some
resource packs
require you can use them without
optifine
but you'll be missing out on a lot of
and it could mess up the textures once
you've got the optifine jar
file double click on it and see if it
opens if it doesn't launch
it means you're missing java so if that
happens
you'll need to install the free java
program windows and mac os
users can download that from java.com
on linux however i prefer to just
install iced
tea from the repositories and then i
open my jar files with that
with java or iced tea installed make
sure minecraft is closed
and double click on the optifine
download again to install it
once done open minecraft and you'll see
a new option to launch the optifine
client
make sure that's selected and launch the
game
by running it once optifine will create
the needed folders for our next steps
close the game client and let's begin
with a resource pack
there are so many to choose from and
there's no de facto
best place to start so i'll give you a
couple of options to get you up and
running and then you can branch out from
there
now first up i'm going to download the
free version of amc
this one is 512x which honestly seems
quite generous for a free release
follow along with me and if your
computer can't handle 512x don't worry
you can remove it and i'll give you a
128x and even a 32x option
in a moment the link for umca
and all the other downloads i mentioned
are in the description
below on the mca download page you can
see a bunch of files with the latest
being
r17 as of the production of this video
i was on the seuss patrons discord and
prime pointed out that some resource
packs
released their versions in a compounding
way
so in those cases you're required to
install
several files not just the most recent
if
you only install the most recent you'll
only have the most recently added
but you'd be missing all of the
previously released ones
um sia is one such pack so i'll have to
download every single one of these
release files
once complete open minecraft and click
options
click resource packs and hit open pack
folder
yes you could just browse to it but by
showing you to do it this way
it'll be the same steps for windows mac
os
or linux now simply cut and paste your
downloaded resource pack files
into this folder don't decompress them
you need to leave them exactly as they
are back in minecraft you'll now see
those resource packs
now notice in my case i'm seeing these
as being incompatible
that's because um sia expects that i
have a shader installed which i have not
yet done
it's still okay for me to add these and
if there's a problem
i can easily remove them add the newest
release
by clicking the arrow on its icon and
then add the next and the next until
you've added them all
notice the order in the right column
that actually matters
you want the newest at the top and the
oldest at the bottom
this way if they've fixed a texture in
one of the newer ones
you'll get that fix now let's open the
a quick note that in extreme cases of
incompatibility
minecraft might actually crash after
adding a resource pack
now if that happens to you just delete
the incompatible resource pack file from
the folder
and restart the game then try a
different pack
probably a lower resolution one in my
case
mca 512x looks and works great
if you find it causes a lot of lag or
otherwise impacts performance
simply disable the resource pack and try
a lower resolution one
if you need a smaller resource pack or
if you simply want to try the next free
option let's take a look at stratum
now this one is found at
continuum.graphics and a reminder that
all the links are in the description
below the free version of stratum is
128x
unlike mcs stratum is released in a
single file
so let's download that one and follow
the same installation steps
[Applause]
i'm actually going to remove um cf from
my loaded resource packs and instead
add stratum
up the game and voila stratum also looks
spectacular when compared to vanilla
and is less resource intensive than
amsia
since it's only 128x and finally
if you still need something that's lower
resolution or you just want to try a
very complete resource pack
you can grab patrick's whose free
version is just
32x so it should run great on any
computer
while still being twice the default
quality of vanilla
with some great added visuals patrix 32x
is distributed in several files and you
can add each of those to get the
complete pack
again all of those resource packs can
have much higher resolution
if you toss a bit of money toward the
developers but i'm showing you
only the free stuff today it's up to you
if you want to get more but
either way i'd start with the free one
and see that it works for you
here's a tip remember how umcea came in
separate numbered release files
and each file adds to the previous well
this is because in older releases some
textures are missing
so the designer then creates those
textures and releases them separately
and by adding both release files you
then get
both sets of those textures making it
more complete but even with all the
releases of a pack you might still
find that some textures are missing
because they have not yet been redone
that said from one resource pack to the
next
each designer might have created other
textures that the other one has not
so by combining your favorite resource
packs and setting their order
you'll end up with a much more complete
texture replacement let's add um
sia and stratum back in while leaving
patrick's active
adjust the order if needed so patrick's
is the fallback since
it's a complete pack and then each
additional release replaces textures
in the order that you set so now if a
texture is missing from
amsia it'll load instead from stratum
before
falling back onto patrick's the only
time that you'd ever see a texture from
vanilla
is if it hasn't been redone by any of
those three resource packs
okay now that we've got an understanding
of resource packs and how to set them up
let's take a look at shader packs there
are a few different types of shader
packs and some will work better than
others on certain hardware
it's fine to run it and if it doesn't
work you can simply remove it by turning
shaders off
generally speaking if you have a decent
video card
you should be okay with most of the
popular options
if your video card doesn't support the
shader pack that you have installed
you'll simply have a very odd gaming
experience and if that happens you can
remove that shader
and try another one or if all else fails
and none of the shaders work at all
you can stick to just a resource pack
that'll mean you won't get the fancy
lighting and shadows that a shader
provides but the textures will still
look a lot nicer
sonic ether's unbelievable shaders or
better known as
soos has a free version called renewed
i'll use that for our demo today since
it supports pretty much
any nvidia card you can download seuss
renewed
from sonichether.com as with resource
packs even
soos has a paid upgrade option seuss
ptgi
which stands for path traced global
illumination
it offers ray tracing like lighting
effects without requiring an rtx
graphics card it's really something to
behold
but what i recommend is that you first
start with seuss renewed which is
completely free
make sure everything works and then if
you want even nicer graphics than the
free version can provide
consider supporting the soos project by
upgrading
i'll download the free version
now in minecraft go to options video
settings
shaders and click on the shaders folder
button
just like the resource packs you just
need to place the shader pack file into
this folder
then activate it in the options video
shaders menu and select the seuss
shader if seuss renewed doesn't work on
your system you might try continuum
which you can download from the same
page as the stratum resource pack
just pop it into the shaders folder and
select it in the options
instead of seuss now launch the game
keeping in mind that we have
three resource packs running along with
seuss renewed for shaders
here it is again without the shader pack
and here it is with soos renewed enabled
enjoy your beautiful new minecraft
experience
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thank you for staying to the end and
just for that i'm going to sign off with
a comparison for you
using nothing but free packs
don't forget if you're not having fun
you're doing it wrong
from category 5 technology tv i'm robbie
ferguson
enjoy the clips
so