The 42 best Minecraft mods 2024

Our list of the 42 top Minecraft mods to use in 2024, including new mobs, bigger maps, new dimensions, and even Minecraft dating simulators.

A snail from one of the best Minecraft mods, Spawn.

What are the best Minecraft mods in 2024? Every game of vanilla Minecraft can vary quite dramatically, and the best Minecraft mods go one step further to provide an entirely new experience. Whether you love creative building, terrifying survival, or speedrunning the story, there’s sure to be a mod for you. There are interface changes, tools to aid your hours of exploration, and even new mobs to fight. You always have the option to make Mojang’s classic even better on PC.

The following list compiles some of the best Minecraft mods out there right now. All are divided into sections, depending on what you want to do with the sandbox game – from simple utility changes to deep, intricate Minecraft mods you can get lost in for months. If you like to browse, the Minecraft CurseForge game mods hub has a whole section dedicated to the best Minecraft mods and add-ons – as well as equivalents for many of the other best PC games right now.

The best Minecraft mods March 2024

The best Minecraft mods include performance mods, like Optifine, and building mods to increase the number of creative items at your disposal. Our top picks, though, are world mods that add new mobs, portals, and biomes. We also highly recommend current fan-faves Weeping Angels and From the Fog.

Three cobblestone golems from Max's Miny Golems, one of the best Minecraft mods, stand in the sunlight.

Our pick of the best Minecraft performance mods:

Here are some of the ultimate Minecraft world mods:

And, finally, some of the best Minecraft building and item mods:

Best Minecraft mods - the same snowy landscape with Optifine on and off, showing clear water and reflected sunlight.

Optifine / Fastcraft

Make Minecraft look incredible with the essential Optifine, which adds support for HD textures and more control over graphical options. You’ll likely need Optifine installed before you can run Minecraft shaders, but even on its own, it provides dynamic lighting, improved textures, and a performance boost. Optifine should be fine on most PC setups, but if you’re playing on a potato, grab Fastcraft instead – it significantly improves performance on lower-end machines, particularly with lots of Minecraft mods installed.

Best Minecraft mods - the Journeymap UI shows a top-down view of the map with all of the terrain types nearby.

Journeymap

Everyone likes to know where they’re going. Journeymap maps your world as you explore, lets you mark waypoints of interest, and even warns you when Minecraft mobs sneak up behind you. View the resulting map in-game as a minimap, in fullscreen, or even in an external web browser.

Best Minecraft mods - the user interface of the Just Enough Items mod, with the player crafting a map and a yellow wool block, and a long list of items on the right and side.

Just Enough Items

If you need an antidote to the pain of alt-tabbing to a wiki while playing Minecraft, then turn to Just Enough Items (or JEI). It lets you look up the recipe for any item from any installed Minecraft mod through a nifty interface on Minecraft’s inventory screen.

Best Minecraft mods - a closed ender chest and the Jade UI showing its contents, a variety of colourful terracotta blocks.

Jade

Jade is a super helpful Minecraft mod, particularly when you have a range of texture or world-changing mods installed alongside it. Not only does Jade tell you which item you are looking at, but it provides additional information, too, like the contents of a chest or any status effects applied to a mob.

Best Minecraft mods - Enchantment Descriptions UI describes Sharpness V enchantment in great detail.

Enchantment Descriptions

For those who need a reminder of what the Minecraft enchantments do at a glance, the Enchantment Descriptions mod gives you the description of any enchanted book in your inventory. This mod also supports modded enchantments and will display these tooltips in over 13 languages.

A close up of a weeping angel from one of the best Minecraft mods on PC.

Weeping Angels

Inspired by the iconic enemies from Doctor Who, this Weeping Angels mod introduces a new hostile mob of sorts. These stunning weeping angel statues that appear in the world are a sight to behold, and holding that stare is exactly what you should do. The second you turn your back on one of these pretty figures, they come to life and attack. Rather than dealing damage, these stone creatures teleport you if they get close enough to touch you and can even transport you to another dimension.

Luckily, creator Suff99 has your best interests at heart, so this mod is entirely customizable. If you are happy to be teleported but don’t want to get stuck in another dimension, you can change the effects. You can even change it so you don’t get teleported at all. Either way, that mysterious winged figure you can just about make out in the distance makes for thrilling Minecraft gameplay.

Two seahorses in the ocean in Spawn, one of the best Minecraft mods.

Spawn

Spawn is one of a few excellent Minecraft mods by Ninni, also the creator of Good Ending (further down this list!). Adding a plethora of new mobs to Minecraft, Spawn was only released in November 2023, so is still fairly new, but Ninni plans to increase the number of new mobs over time. Now, though, there is still plenty to discover, as well as new items and even biomes related to the mobs. There are snails, hamsters, seahorses, angler fish, and even ants.

Delaney the Armorer, a female, human villager, in the Minecraft comes Alive mod.

Minecraft Comes Alive

Have you ever wanted a Minecraft dating sim? A Stardew-Valley like Minecraft mod? Do you just wish the Minecraft villagers would stop making that noise? Well, allow us to introduce you to the Minecraft Comes Alive mod. You could combine this mod with others you’re interested in, as Minecraft Comes Alive focuses only on villages – and the people living within them.

Replacing the identical villagers of old, Minecraft Comes Alive introduces you to uniquely named villagers, like Delany the Armorer above, but the changes don’t stop at appearance. As you interact with these new villagers, you build a relationship with them, ask them to follow you, carry out tasks for you, and even, once you’ve nurtured that relationship enough, ask them to marry you. Interactions are all done with subtitles, and they don’t make that classic villager honk anymore, so you don’t have to worry about their moaning and groaning, leaving you filing for divorce.

A creepy, long-limbed mob crawls through a cave behind the player, baring its teeth, in the Cave Dweller Minecraft mod.

Cave Dweller

Do you think the Minecraft Warden is scary? Well, it’s the least of your underground problems with this terrifying mod enabled. The Cave Dweller mod introduces the Cave Dweller mob (try saying that three times, fast) to the adventure game, and the dark entity follows you around as you explore the world’s caves. In case you were wondering, no, it can’t sneak up on you, as the spooky cave sounds will grow more intense the closer it gets, but we’re not sure that isn’t worse than a swift death, to be honest.

Best Minecraft mods - Twilight Forest mod shows how to build a portal in a journal.

Twilight Forest

This gorgeous mod adds a new portal and an entirely new dimension: the Twilight Forest. You’ll need to play as normal until you’ve gathered the materials to build the portal above, but then you can completely overhaul your Minecraft experience with new dungeons, mythical creatures, and so much more.

Minecraft Mods: Yung's Better Fortresses - Image shows a player in full diamond armor in the left hand corner, looking out over a magnificent improved fortress.

YUNG’s Better Fortresses

Yung’s Better Fortresses is only the tip of Yung’s mod’s iceberg, as the prolific Minecraft modder has also created Better Witch Huts, Ocean Monuments, and almost any other Minecraft structure you can think of. Put them all together, and you’ll have the most incredible Minecraft world imaginable.

For now, though, we’re focusing on our personal favorite, Yung’s Better Fortresses. As you can see from the image above, this Minecraft mod transforms the terrifying Nether by greatly extending its existing Fortresses into even bigger, more magnificent structures, spanning multiple floors and featuring castle-like main buildings. In vanilla Minecraft, these fortresses might be wide, but they don’t really extend up and down. Yung’s better fortresses, on the other hand, include Lava Halls, a part of the structure that delves deep underground.

Best Minecraft mods - in the Biomes O'Plenty mod, there is a Fungal Jungle biome full of orange mushrooms.

Biomes O’Plenty

If there aren’t enough vanilla Minecraft Biomes to keep you busy, Biomes O’Plenty adds masses of new areas across both the Overworld and the Nether – from the Alps to Wasteland and everything in between. It adds a little more variety to tools, armor, food, and color while also adding a few extra blocks to build with.

Best Minecraft mods: a menagerie of animals of all shapes and sizes in Alex's Mobs.

Alex’s Mobs

We know from the now-annual Minecraft mob vote that players are always clamoring for additional animals, monsters, and humanoids to be added to vanilla Minecraft. Well, you don’t need to wait for the next big Minecraft update with Alex’s mobs‘ 84 new animals. This mix of realistic and fictional creatures includes kangaroos, tigers, and a bone serpent – each has a unique mechanic and drops.

A snake on a beach in the Minecraft Mo' Creatures mod.

Mo’ Creatures

If that’s not enough, you can add more mods to your game with Mo’ Creatures. Or make the difficult decision and pick between the two incredible Minecraft mob mods. This one adds 60 mobs to your Minecraft world but isn’t as up-to-date as Alex’s mobs. First created in 2010, the latest version of Minecraft that supports this mod is 1.12.2, but it’s still a trendy mod even to this day.

Mo’ Creatures adds mobs around you in a typical Minecraft setting, including snakes in warm biomes, turkeys in grassy areas, tigers, leopards, and so much more. What makes this mod pop is the sounds made by each mob, like a tiger’s roar as it chows down on a nearby goat.

Best Minecraft mods - a Nether portal in the overworld, showing a basalt delta and magma cubes on the other side.

Immersive Portals

It can be pretty scary throwing yourself headfirst into a Minecraft Nether or end Portal without knowing what’s on the other side. Thankfully, Immersive Portals changes that by showing you precisely what awaits on the other side.

The Waystones mod is one of the best Minecraft mods because it allows you to teleport between named destinations.

Waystones

With such a massive open world, getting back to where your home base can sometimes be a huge hassle. However, with the Waystones mod, you can craft Waystones in survival mode and place them to allow travel between them. You can also make Warp Scrolls or Warp Stones to teleport from anywhere. The mod also allows for random generation in the world of these items and global Waystones for Minecraft servers or Minecraft adventure maps.

Best Minecraft mods - in RLCraft, a purple biome with structures and new mobs.

RLCraft

Still the most popular Minecraft mod of all time, RLCraft plays into the world’s love of fantasy with dragons, fairies, and more added to your Minecraft world. But that’s not all. In addition to the range of terrifying and adorable new mobs, RLCraft features new biomes, new auto-generated structures like towers and dungeons, and an all-new survival experience.

Best Minecraft mods - Grookey, Scorbunny, and Sobble are standing on sand near a wall of materials.

Pixelmon

If there’s anything better than one of the most popular game franchises of all time, it’s two of the most popular game series of all time coming together. Pixelmon does just that, bringing all your favorite Pokemon to the world of Minecraft.

Best Minecraft mods - in SkyFactory 4, a floating landscape featuring different farms and trees.

SkyFactory 4

SkyFactory is one of the most classic Minecraft mods based on the popular SkyBlock map. Combining the original SkyBlock experience with industrial autonomy, SkyFactory 4 lets you lose on a floating Minecraft world full of unique devices, machines, new crops, and even magic.

Best Minecraft mod - the Better Minecraft logo over new neon nether biome.

Better MC

The maker’s vision of what Minecraft should have been, Better MC adds multiple bosses, mobs, crops, items, dimensions, quests, and more to give you the comprehensive Minecraft experience you never knew you needed. We’re not saying we don’t still love the base game, but Minecraft will never be the same again once you’ve tried Better MC.

Minecraft mods: Good Ending is a mod that changed the wilderness, and the image shows a beautiful biome with new flora on top of water, new plants, and new green blocks, adding to the lush landscape.

Good Ending

Good Ending by modders Orcinus and Ninni overhauls the Minecraft wilderness, making the survival game even more beautiful than it already is. If you were one of the players disappointed when fireflies were scrapped from the Wild Update, then Good Ending is for you. Modders have implemented the popular mechanic instead, meaning both the daytime and nighttime atmospheres are incredible in this stunning mod.

Best Minecraft mods - inside a cavernous vault filled with water, stalagmites, and stalagtites.

Vault Hunters

Finally, our last pick of the list is Vault Hunters, another completely game-changing mod pack. Made by popular Minecraft YouTuber and Hermit Iskall85, Vault Hunters takes you deep into thrilling, procedurally-generated vaults, where you must battle your way to valuable loot, armor, and weapons. There’s a fully playable story to Vault Hunters, too, to combine its 25 artifacts to unlock one final, deadly vault.

YouTube Thumbnail

Supplementaries

The Supplementaries mod is an excellent complimentary mod to use alongside vanilla Minecraft and adds many new Redstone items, decorative blocks, and other tools and equipment. If you ever felt like you needed a pulley system or a weather vein that produces a Redstone signal, then Supplementaries has it. Want to lock something up with a key or proudly display your Netherite tools on a pedestal? It has that, too. To use Supplementaries, you must also install the Moonlight Library mod.

Minecraft mods: an oak tree with a face in the Mystical Oak Tree mod.

Mystical Oak Tree

While we’re at it, here’s another one from the maker of Supplementaries – Mystical Oak Tree. We couldn’t resist including this mini-mod, where you can interact with a wise old talking oak. Keep your eyes peeled for an oak tree with a face in any of the overworld biomes, and interact with the tree to hear jokes, facts, and more. Be careful not to talk to them during the day, as they don’t take it well to be woken from their sleep. Definitely don’t try to attack them – they’ll fight back.Five plank golems from Max's Miny Golems, one of the best Minecraft mods, stand in a row surrounded by flowers and grass.

Max’s Miny Golems

If you’ve jumped into Minecraft Legends since its release, you might be familiar with the cute golems you can recruit to aid you in battle in the strategy game. Well, those mobs now appear in the original Minecraft, thanks to the Max’s Miny Golems mod.

While Max’s Miny Golems has some familiar faces from Legends, there are some differences. Firstly, there are more than the three base Legends golems here, as Max has added some of their own, with plans to add Beehive and Slime golems in the future. New items have been added as well to craft these cute companions, including new slabs, flowers, and grindstone variants.

A frog sits in a pet bed, and is accompanied by text displaying its enchantments, extra health, charismatic, and bubbling, in the Minecraft mod Domestication Innovation.

Domestication Innovation

From the same people that brought you Alex’s mobs, Domestication Innovation improves upon player interaction with mobs – both vanilla and modded. Enchant your pets, tame otherwise untameable mobs, use them in battle, and send them to sleep in their beds. The different enchantments can make your domesticated mobs do extraordinary things, like pull entities close, send enemies flying, and strike hostile mobs with lightning. Domestication Innovation doesn’t just work on vanilla mobs and Alex’s mobs but other creator’s mods, as well.

A range of green and brown trees showing autumn in the Serene Seasons Minecraft mod.

Serene Seasons

While you can get from winter to summer in Minecraft by traveling between a Snowy Taiga and a Desert biome, the Serene Seasons mod brings seasonal changes to biomes, including amended crop growth and weather patterns. Some biomes that aren’t usually snowy will see snowfall with Serene Seasons turned on, and you’ll see brown and orange leaves throughout autumn.

An error screen from the Minecraft mod From the Fog which reads: "Minecraft has detected an unknown presence in this world. It is advides you DO NOT PASS THIS SCREEN."

From the Fog

Do you ever wish the Herobrine creepy pasta myth was real? That a creepy non-Steve was a constant threat as you roamed the world at night, bright white eyes peering out at you from behind the trees? Well, firstly, why? Secondly, you’re in luck. From the Fog is a terrifyingly creepy Minecraft mod that brings Herobrine to life alongside zombie Herobrine and sculk Herobrine cos, you know, Herobrine alone isn’t frightening enough.

YouTube Thumbnail

All the Mods 9

If you want a bit of everything from above, then this chunky mod pack is for you. The ATM team (All The Mods) has been creating mammoth modpacks for a while now, and the All the Mods series is a go-to, ready-made bundle if you want multiple mods but don’t want to put them together yourself. All the Mods 9 includes hundreds of mods, including some of those listed above. That said, it’s a pretty hefty download, so you might be unable to run All the Mods 9 on a lower-end PC.

Some of the unique achievements in Natural Progression, one of the best Minecraft mods.

Natural Progression

Natural Progression is the ideal mod for those who want a new Minecraft challenge, sticking to the vanilla theme of the game but with a more realistic twist. Instead of punching trees for wood at the start of the game, the Natural Progression mod introduces more materials to discover and craft with to make the early hours of your survival more true to life. Find pebbles or bones to craft your first weapons, and only then can you gather wood to craft a full crafting table and continue your adventure, making the first night or two more challenging than ever.

Minecraft mods: dungeons enhanced

Dungeons Enhanced

Minecraft has always been fairly limited in terms of the structures or dungeons you can happen upon in the open-world game. It stands to reason then that this could begin to get repetitive. Enter the Dungeons Enhanced mod. This mod adds new dungeons and structures, increasing the total types to 21 and they all fit a medieval or fantasy theme. You’ll soon be stumbling upon huge mazes, castles, or even a pyramid.

A freezing snow biome in Minecraft, with the Temperature mod.

Minecraft Temperature mod

If you want a little more of the survival game element in your Minecraft, the Temperature mod adds freezing and overheating status effects to cold and hot biomes, making it more difficult to traverse these lands. While something similar does now exist in vanilla Minecraft when you sink into powdered snow, no effect applies anywhere else in the world. With Temperature, you must make sure you’re wearing sufficient protection from the elements, like leaving the heavy armor behind (iron or diamond) when in deserts and jungles, and gearing up in full leather for freezing biomes.

Four cute little Minecraft frogs play musical instruments in Ribbits, one of the best Minecraft mods.

Ribbits

Unlike most of the mods on this page, Ribbits isn’t available for free on CurseForge or Nexus Mods, and requires a Patreon subscription for Bonsai Studios, so we weren’t sure whether to include it or not. However, we couldn’t resist, and we agree with modder Yung – mentioned above in Yung’s Better Fortresses – when they say this might be the cutest mod they’ve ever made.

Ribbits adds more frogs to swamp biomes. Simple. And sure, we’ve already got frogs in swamp biomes, why would we need more? Well, these adorable frogs form cute folk bands and play music. We don’t think any more needs saying, to be honest, but if you’re still not convinced, just watch this tweet for a video of them in action.

Ribbits is currently in early access, so we may see the mod on the usual platforms once it’s fully developed.

A Minecraft player looks up at two bees wearing a bee-themed backpack from one of the best Minecraft mods, travelers backpack.

Traveler’s Backpacks

Mojang tried to give us bundles, and, while they seem to have been indefinitely postponed, you can still try them in-game thanks to experimental features. That said, it’s not really the same, and Minecraft modder Tiviacz has taken things one step further with Traveler’s Backpack. This adorable mod doesn’t only increase your storage capacity when you’re exploring the world, but it does so in style, giving you a choice of cute backpack to match your environment – just look at that Apiarist backpack above!

YouTube Thumbnail

World Edit

If you follow any of the best Minecraft YouTubers, you most likely will have heard at least some mention of World Edit. Downloaded millions of times, World Edit gives players an easy way of building magnificent creations in Minecraft, with copy, paste, and move features and the ability to switch out one block type for another.

Watch the video above from Hermitcraft YouTuber Grian to learn more about what you can do in World Edit if you’re just getting started.

YouTube Thumbnail

Axiom

The relatively new Axiom mod is an alternative to the classic World Edit, also featuring options to manipulate blocks, easily terraform large areas of ground in a few clicks, and life, move, and duplicate large builds.

Best Minecraft mods - a detailed bar with stools and wine bottles in the LittleTiles.

Little Tiles

To kick off the building mod section of this guide, we’re going right in at the deep end. While the limitations of Minecraft’s blocks may be part of the fun for many, LittleTiles allows those who want more flexibility to build with pixel-sized tiles. With LittleTiles, therefore, the only limitation is your imagination. This mod’s teeny blocks can even be used to make moveable parts, twinkling lights, and so much more.

Best Minecraft mods - the Chisel UI allowing players to see the new battery.

Chisel

Chisel gives you access to, well, a chisel, which allows you to change the texture of any block. With a vast range of industrial-style textures, Chisel allows players to build the most complex and intricate mechanical builds.

Best Minecraft mods - in FramedBlocks, an arrangement of Minecraft modded blocks.

FramedBlocks

Cubes are great and all, but occasionally, you want a slope, right?FramedBlocks adds a ridiculous number of new shapes to the Minecraft inventory for you to work into your unique builds. Even better, though, is that they also have customizable textures. Simply right-click on your slope, slab, or step with any other Minecraft block, and it will take on that texture. Want a flower pot made of wool? You got it.

Best Minecraft mod - Decocraft items, pumpkins, chair, table, toys, and cactus.

Decocraft

If you’d like a bit more variety when it comes to decorating your Minecraft house, Decocraft is the mod for you. It adds around 3,000 new customization items, including craftable chairs, tables, bowls, bottles, lamps, stuffed toys, beer kegs, and even a kitchen sink. To keep up to date with all those items, you can join the mod’s official Discord.

Best Minecraft mods - in Bibliocraft, here is a set of shelves filled with books, armour, and weapons.

Bibliocraft

Bibliocraft also offers many aesthetically pleasing blocks, but these come with their functionality. Based initially around customizable bookshelves, Bibliocraft also offers display cases, and shelves let you show off your armor and trophies, while a printing press lets you copy in-game books. It even adds a monocle for the distinguished Minecrafters among you.

Best Minecraft mods - an assortment of fruit and vegetables in Pam's Harvestcraft 2 UI, list of crops.

Pam’s HarvestCraft 2

It’s not so much a mod for building but one that does introduce new items to the menu. Pam’s Harvestcraft 2 brings some serious variation to your Minecraft diet. A follow-up to the original Pam’s Harvestcraft – which can still be used in Minecraft versions up to 1.12 –  PH2 is split into four separate mods: Food Core, Crops, Trees, and Food Extended. The result is a Minecraft diet that is lavish and balanced. If you want to make this a necessity rather than just a fun extension to vanilla Minecraft, use it alongside Hunger Overhaul and The Spice of Life, which both punish your poor eating habits.

Hopefully, with all those mods to choose from, you’re ready to get lost in Minecraft all over again. If you need a handy tool to manage your mods, our guide to installing and using Minecraft Forge will help you organize your modding needs. If that’s still not enough diversity from the vanilla game, check out our list of the best crafting games on PC.