16 years after Minecraft first released it's getting a modern visual upgrade with a retro lighting trick that Mojang hasn't seen "in any other game"

During the most recent edition of Minecraft Live, developer Mojang announced the upcoming Vibrant Visuals update, which will bring a host of modern graphical upgrades to the sandbox game. Minecraft looked old-school even when its first public alpha build launched in 2009, and the fancy new lighting and shadow effects still come with an old-school twist.

"One of my favorite things that the team created is the way shadows align with the grids and pixels," chief creative officer Jens Bergensten says in a video breaking down the Vibrant Visuals update. "I have not seen that in any other game and it feels true to Minecraft."

If you look closely at the shadows in the preview footage, you'll see that they align directly with the pixel grid of the textures they're being cast against. While mobs like bees, for example, are made out of straight-edged rectangles, at many angles their shadows will take on pixelated edges to better match the retro aesthetics of those textures. The same goes reflections on the surface of the water or the scattered light hitting a lake bed floor.

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"The shadows, they add a lot of good contrast to the world," art director Jasper Boerstra adds. "It helps put everything in context and it will make the world feel a little bit more familiar. You can also see in the reflections that they're pixelated according to the texture. This is for the sake of consistency and we think it looks great."

Texture tricks aside, the new lighting effects will seem pretty familiar if you've ever messed with Java Edition mods. "Over time, and after seeing all the cool things players were making," Bergensten says, "we decided that Vanilla Minecraft deserved something better." Consequently, Mojang added dedicated visual artists to the team, and their work is paying off in updates like World of Color and Vibrant Visuals.

Vibrant Visuals will hit "compatible Bedrock devices in the coming months." Mojang has not announced exactly which devices those will be, but it's a safe bet they'll include PCs and current-gen consoles at a minimum. It's a purely visual upgrade that you can toggle in the settings, so if you're running on a lower-end device or playing with friends who don't want it there's no downside.

Don't expect Minecraft to go free-to-play anytime soon, as Mojang says "It doesn't really work with the way we built it."