Despite Minecraft’s overwhelming popularity and critical acclaim, it’s not a perfect game. Yes, Minecraft is brimming with satisfying game mechanics and endless possibilities. But it does have its fair share of flaws. Luckily for us, many creators in the Minecraft community have gone out of their way to make mods that address these flaws improving the overall experience for Minecraft newbies and Veterans alike. The goal of these mods is to improve upon vanilla Minecraft, addressing its flaws, while not drastically overhauling the game or its mechanics. So to help you work towards a flawless Minecraft experience I’ve compiled this list of some of the best Quality-of-Life mods that the Minecraft community has to offer.
20. GraveStone Mod
Check Out This Mod Version: 1.16 To kick off this list, we’ve chosen a mod that fits the definition of Quality-of-Life to a tee: The GraveStone Mod. This places a grave when you die, which is a breakable block that will return the player all of their items in their correct inventory slot. With this mod, gone are the days of losing your stuff in lava, or having it all despawn. Or the days of having to re-sort your inventory on death. This mod is very convenient, although certainly makes the game easier, removing one of the biggest risks in the game. So those of you who prefer a more hardcore experience ought to stay clear.
19. NetherPortalFix
Check Out This Mod Version: 1.16 We’ve all found ourselves coming back from a long trek within the Nether, finally getting to go through our portal home, then poof you’re in another player’s base. Linking Nether portals properly can be tedious and confusing, due to coordinates in the Nether not directly corresponding with coordinates in the Overworld. This is where NetherPortalFix comes in. This mod ensures players will always return to the portal they entered through when leaving the Nether (through the portal they arrived in).
18. KleeSlabs
Check Out This Mod Version: 1.16 A common trend you’ll see on this list are mods that provide very small changes, that really should be in the vanilla game. KleeSlabs is one such mod. It allows the player to break individual half slabs once they’re stacked together. It isn’t the most revolutionary mod, but it really makes you wonder why it isn’t a vanilla feature. Although isn’t that the perfect description of a great Quality-of-Life mod?
17. Enchantment Descriptions
Check Out This Mod Version: 1.17 Enchanting in Minecraft is now nearly a decade old, added all the way back in 2011. With the advent of new items and ideas, it has been expanded on for years; meaning, we have 40 unique enchantments in the game. I don’t know about you, but I frequently have to google the effect of a specific enchantment (I still can never remember what Impaling does). This exact situation, which many of you likely face, is exactly what makes Enchantment Descriptions so useful. Enchantment Descriptions adds just that: small tooltips listing what each enchantment does, saving us a trip to the wiki.
16. Dynamic Surroundings
Check Out This Mod Version: 1.16 Minecraft sounds… adequate? Don’t get me wrong, the music is absolutely fantastic. And the sound design is definitely satisfactory. But Minecraft is not a game that is renowned for its great sound design or anything. That’s where Dynamic Surroundings comes in. This serves to improve the visual and auditory experience of Minecraft (among one of the better music/audio mods out there). The mod adds audio and visual effects that make Minecraft look and sound better, without changing the game core mechanics. This makes Dynamic Surroundings a highly enjoyable mod that certainly fits the Quality-of-Life category.
15. Inventory Tweaks
Check Out This Mod Version: 1.12 Inventory Tweaks is a mod that provides a plethora of relatively small and convenient features, all centered around the inventory. It automatically replaces held items when they break or run out (assuming you have more in your inventory), provides inventory and chest sorting buttons, and a variety of shortcuts for moving items around. Despite its usefulness, Inventory Tweaks has one core problem preventing it from ranking higher on the list: It’s only available for version 1.12 (as of this writing).
14. Controlling
Check Out This Mod Version: 1.16 Controlling is a very simple mod. So simple that it’ll make you question why Mojang hasn’t implemented it themselves. Controlling adds a search bar in the Key-bindings menu… Yup, that’s all! To the point and very useful.
13. Clumps
Check Out This Mod Version: 1.17 One of the things that can completely ruin a player’s Quality-of-Life is lag. Whether it be client-side or server-side lag, it can be immensely frustrating for a player, possibly making the game unplayable in its entirety. However, mods can come to the rescue once again. Clumps is one such mod, designed to reduce lag for both an individual player and a server. Clumps causes XP orbs to gather together into one large orb, reducing the amount of lag causing entities in the game. This can be quite helpful on large servers, or for individuals with low-end hardware. Furthermore, Clumps also allows the player to collect all the orbs at once – saving time and reducing lag further.
12. Mouse Tweaks
Check Out This Mod Version: 1.16 Crafting and Inventory navigation are two of the most important aspects of Minecraft. Mouse Tweaks serves to make doing both easier. Mouse Tweaks expands upon some of the mouse inputs the player can use in the inventory and crafting menu. As opposed to vanilla Minecraft, with Mouse Tweaks the player can click and drag with both the right and left mouse buttons, allowing the player to gather items of the same type, move them quickly between inventories, and split them evenly in the crafting grid. Mouse Tweaks isn’t the most game-changing mod of all time. But it does provide you with a minor yet helpful tweak to the game. Basically the definition of a QOL mod.
11. Swing Through Grass
Check Out This Mod Version: 1.16 The name of this mod is as self-explanatory as it gets: It allows you to swing through grass. Who’d have thought? More specifically, this mod prevents the player from breaking collision-less blocks such as saplings, flowers, cobwebs, or the aforementioned grass while wielding a weapon – such as an axe or a sword. This prevents the all too familiar frustrating experience of accidently weeding your garden while just trying to kill a zombie!
10. Timber Mod
Check Out This Mod Version: 1.16 Timmmmmmmmmmmmber! This convenient mod allows you to break down an entire tree by simple hacking away at the lowest block. This comes in super handy while trying to get large quantities of wood, or to partake in massive deforestation, everyday needs in Minecraft. By far the best part of this mod is not needing to build up and get those pesky pieces of leftover wood – an all too familiar annoyance for Minecraft players. And for those of you worried about this mod making the game too easy, worry not. This still requires the same amount of mining time and tool durability to chop down a tree.
9. Nature’s Compass
Check Out This Mod Version: 1.16 Oh, the places you’ll go! (Once you have the Nature’s Compass of course) This handy mod adds the “Nature’s Compass” to the game. It’s a craftable item that allows the player to locate biomes and learn information about them. Gone are the days of searching for hours for that one Jungle biome. Simply craft the Nature’s Compass using a vanilla compass, wood, and saplings, and you’ll know exactly where to go.
8. Storage Drawers
Check Out This Mod Version: 1.16 Let’s face it, Minecraft has a storage problem. With a wide array of items coming from endless sources, the average Minecraft player’s inventory is incredibly cluttered. Thus, this mod kicks off a trend you’ll see repeated a lot in this list: additional storage. However, Storage Drawers doesn’t simply add fancy looking chests, rather the aforementioned drawers work vastly different from the average Minecraft storage medium. Storage Drawers have no UI. You interact with them externally to quell your storage needs. Right click to input the item in your hand, and left click to take out items you need. While this may seem unintuitive or limiting, I’m sure you’ll come to find having access to stacks of your most used resources just a few clicks away will come in handy – not to mention they look gorgeous!
7. Waystones
Check Out This Mod Version: 1.16 The Waystones mod allows players to get between frequently visited locations in just a click of a button. It couldn’t be more useful. This mod introduces a craftable block known as a Waystone, which is capable of linking with other Waystones, allowing you to teleport between them. It also allows players to craft Warp Scrolls, letting them teleport back to a Waystone from anywhere. And for those worried about these Waystones making the game too easy, I’m sure you’ll come to find the expensive crafting recipe and repeated XP cost to teleport, will make them very vanilla friendly.
6. AppleSkin
Check Out This Mod Version: 1.17 The AppleSkin mod is the dictionary definition of Quality-of-Life. AppleSkin is all about food, although it doesn’t add fancy new dishes or make the player need to eat more. It actually provides you with something endlessly more useful: Information. This mod provides a variety of important info regarding food, in the form of tooltips and visuals on your HUD, which vanilla Minecraft has unfortunately never provided. With AppleSkin, players are able to know the potential hunger, saturation, and health restoration their food provides. And once you have this info you’ll never want to live without.
5. Iron Chest
Check Out This Mod Version: 1.16 Players who have dabbled in Minecraft modding are likely very familiar with Iron Chests, and it’s an incredibly ubiquitous mod. Iron Chest is simple and sweet: Basically it provides various chests that are crafted out of the game’s many minerals. These chests, spanning Dirt to Diamond in material, provide you with a lot more space than conventional Minecraft chests – capping out at an astonishing 108 slots, 4x bigger than the vanilla Minecraft chest.
4. Useful Backpacks
Check Out This Mod Version: 1.16 I’ll be the first to admit that I absolutely love Shulker Boxes. Before their release, carrying large quantity of items in Minecraft was a nightmare. They’re just dandy. Although I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge their flaws. Having to place a physical block to then open it and rebreak it is… cumbersome to say the least. Useful Backpacks comes with all the storage benefits of Shulker Boxes, but none of the hassle. Simply right click them in your inventory and access your supplies. Easily one of the best inventory mods worth checking out (along with the others in this list).
3. Journey Map
Check Out This Mod Version: 1.16 These final three entries in our ranking are some of the most popular Minecraft mods of all time – and for good reason. Let’s keep things rolling here with Journey Map, a mod that provides you with a real time mini map of the world around you, as well as several other useful features such as waypoints or death markers. Players who download this mod will quickly find out that a mini map in Minecraft is something they’ve always wanted, without knowing it. From navigating your base or just getting a good sense of its scale, Journey Maps is endlessly handy.
2. OptiFine
Check Out This Mod Version: 1.17 OptiFine is perhaps the most ubiquitous mods of all time. And rightfully so. It adds a plethora of performance boosting changes and options to Minecraft, making the settings vastly more customizable. It’s the coup de grâce of performance enhancing mods, known for routinely doubling the FPS of its users. OptiFine can be quite technical, though. Meaning it can be daunting for less tech-savvy players. But even without any player input into the mod, it can still vastly improve the game’s performance, making it invaluable. If you’re only able to download one mod on this list, OptiFine could be it.
1. Just Enough Items
Check Out This Mod Version: 1.16 So we finally arrive at the holy grail of Quality-of-Life (and possibly all) Minecraft mods: Just Enough Items. This is one of the most popular Minecraft mods of all time, providing players with an easy-to-use catalogue of every item and every crafting recipe in the game, all right in their inventory. Being able to simply type in the name or scroll through a catalogue to see exactly how to craft any item is extremely useful. Plus for you avid modders out there, Just Enough Items is compatible with nearly every single mod – an invaluable feature for sure.
