Better Leaves Resource Pack 1.21 / 1.20

Motschen’s Better Leaves – while the name itself might give you an idea of what this resource pack is all about, it still adds a lot of value to the game despite its simplicity. Every Minecraft player, veteran or novice, knows that the game’s trademark is its textures’ cartoonish, child-like appearance. However, every now and then you get an urge to spice it up a bit, whether it’s with a resource pack or a mod. Motschens Better Leaves resource pack modifies arguably the most abundant object in the game – trees – more precisely, their leaves. Even in their default state, leaves are special in that their looks change depending on the graphics settings. When the mode is set to “fancy”, they’re transparent, while on “fast” those regions become black/dark green. Additionally, they provide a wide range of different colors, which change depending on the biome that they’re in. Fortunately, the Better Leaves resource pack works on every occasion by enriching the existing texture with additional layers, while making the leaves themselves appear bushier. This makes the trees look more lively and vibrant, which is almost guaranteed to improve immersion in the game. Now, if you’re used to hundreds of thousands of different resource packs that change the core of Minecraft by completely redoing the game’s original textures, you’re in for a treat. Motschen’s Better Leaves goes by the saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Once you turn it on and enter a world, you’ll probably wonder if it even works. This is because the only thing that it does modify are leaves. If you’ve been playing Minecraft for a long time, you’ll be surprised that this is even a possibility. In the older versions, the only way to make those kinds of changes was through mods, which by themselves were a pain to implement. With this kind of implementation, you can use it just like you would any other regular resource pack. If you don’t want to go through the struggle of downloading anything else, Motschen’s Better Leaves texture pack can work completely standalone.

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However, the pack’s creator highly recommends downloading Optifine beforehand, as well as enabling its Smart Leaves option. This tiny modification removes certain elements from leaves that can cause huge performance drops, so if you have an outdated PC, make sure to do it. However, if for some reason you don’t want to install Optifine, there’s an alternative. The Cull Leaves mod will bring you the exact same results, although the installation process is slightly different. As you can probably guess from the previous paragraph, Motschen Better Leaves will work on any kind of machine that can support vanilla Minecraft. It doesn’t change any significant details such as the textures’ resolution, retaining the original 16×16. At its core, this resource pack simply rearranges the existing pixels to give leaves a more detailed, polished look. Due to its vanilla nature, it can combine with almost any other resource pack. The textures will adjust dynamically, just make sure that you’re not using another resource pack that modifies leaves specifically. Additionally, Motschan’s Better Leaves supports a couple of popular Forge mods that add new biomes into the game, such as Biomes O’ Plenty. If you’re not a fan of Forge, it can also be used with some fabric mods. If you’ve got better hardware and want to further improve the look of the game, shaders blend in perfectly with this resource pack. Realistic shadows combined with the motion of the leaves will further increase the liveliness of the trees in the game. As if the pack can’t get any more lightweight, the download itself takes up less than half a megabyte. There are over 6 million downloads on the official sources, as well as hundreds of comments praising it, which should give you an idea of how well-made the Motschen’s Better Leaves pack is. Also, the creator remains active even today, with frequent updates and changes on a weekly basis. Alongside the changes that conform to new Minecraft updates, additional support for other mods is expected in the future. Even if you change your mind and don’t like it, it costs you nothing to download it and give it a shot.