With such a colossal database of mods and modpacks to choose from nowadays, it can be very daunting for a player new to modding, or someone who wants to set up their own modded Minecraft server, to even know where to look. That’s why we’ve put together this guide to the best mods in Minecraft for 1.19. Below you’ll find information on the very best modpacks and mods we’ve found over the years, along with download links for each one. We’ll also explain how to get started downloading and installing Minecraft mods, and give you some key information on the best tools to use to make your modding life easier.
Best Minecraft mods
Below we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about mods in Minecraft. We’ll explain how to install mods using the default launcher or a custom launcher; whether to use Forge or Fabric; and the best modpacks and mods that the playerbase has to offer. That means all you need to do is keep scrolling to learn about the following fantastic mods and modpacks. Here are the best Minecraft mods for 1.19:
RLCraft Pixelmon FTB Revelation FTB Chocolate SkyFactory 4 Better Minecraft Valhelsia: Enhanced Vanilla Sodium Optifine Clumps Biomes O’Plenty Terralith JourneyMap Antique Atlas Nature’s Compass Corail Tombstone Waystones WorldEdit Chisels & Bits Useful Backpacks Iron Chests HWYLA Inventory Sorter FastWorkbench SwingThroughGrass FastLeafDecay AppleSkin
How to install Minecraft mods
The process for installing Minecraft mods differs depending on whether you’re using a Minecraft mod launcher or not. Many third-party Minecraft launchers nowadays are designed to help you download and install mods with ease, so if you’re using a launcher such as MultiMC, you can download and install individual mods and modpacks from within the launcher itself. If you’re just using the standard Minecraft Launcher, you can still easily play with mods. Simply download the mods you want to use, and then move the downloaded Executable Jar File for each mod into your “mods” folder in your Minecraft directory. You can find your Minecraft directory by opening Windows Explorer and typing into the address bar “%appdata%.minecraft”. If you don’t have a mods folder there, go ahead and create one. After that you can run Minecraft, select the instance of Minecraft you want to run, and click play.
Forge or Fabric: which Minecraft mod loader should you use?
Whether you’re using the standard Minecraft launcher or a third-party launcher, you’ll need a mod loader like Forge or Fabric to run most Minecraft mods. Only certain mods, such as Optifine, can run without a mod loader. The choice of which mod loader is best for you depends on which mods you want to use. Lots of mods can only be run on the longer-standing Forge, so you may end up wanting to use Forge simply so you can use all the mods you want. However, if all the mods you want to run can indeed be played on either Forge or Fabric, then I’d suggest using Fabric since I’ve found it to be the more lightweight and user-friendly of the two choices.
Best Minecraft mod launchers
If you want to make the process of downloading and installing mods easier, then the best thing to do is download and install a third-party Minecraft launcher that you can use instead of Minecraft’s default launcher. Here are a few recommendations for mod launchers.
MultiMC
MultiMC is generally considered to be the gold standard when it comes to third-party Minecraft launchers. It’s very easy with MultiMC to create new instances of Minecraft, pick the version, and then load it up with all the mods your heart desires. It’s easy to configure and make changes to existing instances when you want to add new mods or disable outdated mods.
ATLauncher
ATLauncher is steadily making a name for itself as a lightweight and powerful Minecraft launcher capable of adding modpacks and mods to your game with ease. The UI isn’t exactly beautiful, but it’s a reliable and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to browse and install mods without any unexpected difficulties.
CurseForge
The CurseForge app has support for a great many games besides Minecraft, but you can easily just use it as a Minecraft launcher. It’s a sleek and clean launcher which allows you to very easily incorporate CurseForge mods and modpacks into your game.
Best Minecraft modpacks
Below we’ll walk you through the very best Minecraft modpacks on offer in 2022. Because modpacks generally contain so many mods, it’s much harder to find entire modpacks which can be used with the latest version of Minecraft. So below we’ve listed the best modpacks out there, along with info on which version of Minecraft you’ll need to use to play each one.
RLCraft
Minecraft version: 1.12.2 | Download RLCraftKey mods: Ice and Fire, Better Combat Rebirth, Doomlike Dungeons, No Tree Punching RLCraft is the most downloaded Minecraft modpack on CurseForge, and for good reason. It’s a massive overhaul of vanilla Minecraft which adds greatly to the difficulty of the game from the very beginning. You now have to take care not only of your hunger, but also your thirst and temperature. What’s more, several mob-related mods add a great many new and powerful creatures to the Minecraft mobs list in RLCraft.
Pixelmon
Minecraft version: 1.12.2 | Download PixelmonKey mods: Pixelmon, Biomes O’Plenty, Journeymap The Pixelmon Modpack is centred around one of the most famous and beloved mods out there - Pixelmon. If you want to bring some of that classic Pokemon capturing, training, and fighting of creatures to Minecraft, then there’s nothing better out there. But the Pixelmon Modpack goes further by adding a couple of other choice mods into the mix, such as the ever-popular Biomes O’Plenty mod, and integration with Journeymap.
FTB Revelation
Minecraft version: 1.12.2 | Download FTB RevelationKey mods: EnderIO, Applied Energistics, Thaumcraft, Botania, Immersive Engineering Feed The Beast was once more or less the only big name out there in Minecraft modpacks. Nowadays there are a great many different modpacks released by the FTB team, and FTB Revelation is a great place to start if you’re just dipping your toes into large-scale overhauls for the first time. Revelation adds over 200 mods covering nearly every aspect of Minecraft, offering a huge amount of new biomes, items, building blocks, and mechanics to figure out.
FTB Chocolate
Minecraft version: 1.18.2 | Download FTB ChocolateKey mods: Terralith 2.0, When Dungeons Arise, Copper Equipment, Crafting Tweaks, Farsight FTB Chocolate is FTB’s newest modpack. It focuses on a gameplay experience that’s closer to vanilla than many other modpacks, but with an emphasis on exploration and a host of quality of life mods which increase performance, add new options for building and exploring, and more.
SkyFactory 4
Minecraft version: 1.12.2 | Download SkyFactory 4Key mods: Resource Trees, Astral Sorcery, Compact Machines 3, Sky Orchards, Mystcraft If Skyblock is your favourite way to play Minecraft, then SkyFactory 4 is the ultimate modpack for you, adding a host of mods which add tonnes of new features such as magic, automation, and more. SkyFactory4 boasts over 30 world and island types, giving you a great many more exotic experiences than the typical patch of grassland with an oak tree on top.
Better Minecraft
Minecraft version: 1.16.5 | Download Better MinecraftKey mods: Biomes O’Plenty, Dungeon Crawl, Croptopia, Bigger Caves, Xaero’s Minimap Touting itself as “Minecraft 2”, Better Minecraft is an overhaul modpack which touches on every part of Minecraft, but particularly on the exploration and fighting aspects. It’s filled with dangerous mobs and bosses, new biomes, and even new dimensions to get lost inside. Add to those a range of performance and quality of life mods, and you’ve got an excellent modpack worthy of any adventurer’s time.
Valhelsia: Enhanced Vanilla
Minecraft version: 1.18.2 | Download Valhelsia: Enhanced VanillaKey mods: Terralith 2.0, LevelZ, RpgDifficulty, Applied Energistics 2, Chisels & Bits Valhelsia brings a number of RPG progression elements into Minecraft with its selection of high-quality mods. As with many other modpacks in this list there’s a great many new biomes and other sights to explore, but here the focus is on upgrading your character over time as you steadily progress from the safety of your starting area out into more dangerous and deadly lands.
Best Minecraft FPS and performance mods
Sodium
Minecraft version: 1.19 | Download Sodium Ooh, controversial! I’m putting Sodium above Optifine! Why? Because Sodium really does seem to be just slightly better than Optifine at optimising Minecraft and wringing as much performance from your machine as possible. Sodium is built for use with Fabric, and offers a great many extra options for customising the look of your Minecraft world and toning down or disabling the more performance-expensive aspects of vanilla Minecraft’s graphics rendering. When used in conjunction with Iris Shaders, Sodium is also the best platform I’ve found for running the best Minecraft shaders, allowing you to run them at the highest FPS possible and switch between them quickly on the fly. What’s more, if you’re missing certain useful features of Optifine (zooming, connected textures, and so on), the Fabric community has put together a host of extra mods that do all those things too.
Optifine
Minecraft version: 1.19 | Download Optifine What is there to say about Optifine that hasn’t already been said a thousand times over? It’s the most popular Minecraft mod in existence. It drastically increases the number of customisation options for Minecraft’s graphics and rendering, making Mojang’s notoriously un-optimised behemoth of a game surprisingly performant. Plus, just like Sodium, it lets you run your favourite shader packs - though don’t expect that to increase your FPS. Quite the reverse. Optifine is your best bet if you’re not using Fabric. It’s incredibly easy to play Optifine without a mod loader, but annoyingly, running Optifine with either Forge or Fabric ends up being a bit of a pain, because you need to incorporate either OptiForge or OptiFabric (depending on your mod loader of choice) into your downloading to run it alongside Optifine.
Clumps
Minecraft version: 1.19 | Download Clumps Unlike Sodium and Optifine, Clumps isn’t a great big FPS-increasing overhaul of the entire game. Instead, it solves one particular problem which tends to cause FPS drops in vanilla Minecraft: lots of experience orbs floating around at once. This is a very common sight in worlds where players have put together XP farms to help with their Minecraft enchanting needs. Clumps is a lifesaver in these places because, as the name suggests, it clumps together all nearby XP orbs into a single orb, significantly decreasing the amount of work required by the game to render all those floating collectibles.
Best Minecraft exploration mods
Biomes O’ Plenty
Minecraft version: 1.19 | Download Biomes O’ Plenty There’s a reason for Biomes O’ Plenty finding its way onto all the best Minecraft mods lists online: it’s damn good at what it does. This expansive mod adds a great many new biome types to Minecraft’s world generation, along with dozens of new block types, new foliage, and much more. This is an essential mod for injecting renewed life and interest into your Minecraft worlds, and giving you a reason to explore the Overworld again. Of course, using this mod completely changes world generation, so you won’t be able to use our list of best Minecraft seeds, but who needs it when you’ve got so many new biomes to explore? Just be aware that if you want to use Biomes O’Plenty with 1.18 or above, you’ll also need to install TerraBlender alongside it.
Terralith
Minecraft version: 1.19 | Download Terralith Terralith has the same goal as Biomes O’Plenty - to give you fantastic new terrain to explore. But Terralith does it without adding any new blocks at all - it works purely by changing terrain generation itself to create new landmarks such as volcanos, canyons, floating islands, and so on. Terralith also boasts a similar overhaul to Minecraft’s underground as well as its overworld, with new cave types and biomes to explore. Exploring a Terralith-made Minecraft world is always a treat, and it makes it very difficult to pick between Terralith or Biomes O’Plenty. But the good news is: you don’t have to choose! They’re both compatible with each other, so just download both and get exploring!
JourneyMap
Minecraft version: 1.9 | Download JourneyMap Available only for Forge, JourneyMap is a frankly astounding map mod for Minecraft which lets you map your world in real-time and then view your map either in full-screen or as a minimap in-game; or, best of all, in a web browser window while you play! It’s this final method which has made JourneyMap such a staple Minecraft mod all these years. Nothing quite beats playing Minecraft on one screen and then on another screen seeing a map of your world update in real-time beside you. JourneyMap also comes with a host of options for configuring the map itself and how it presents information to you.
Antique Atlas
Minecraft version: 1.17.1 | Download Antique Atlas There are various map mods out there, and JourneyMap is superior to most of them: but Antique Atlas is well worth a mention simply because of its wonderful aesthetic. This mod allows you to craft an Antique Atlas item out of a Book and a Compass, after which you can open the book up to view a beautiful Zelda-esque drawn map of your surroundings. The fact that the map lives in a book rather than on a separate screen makes the whole mod feel much more natural and immersive than any other map mod I’ve ever used.
Nature’s Compass
Minecraft version: 1.19 | Download Nature’s Compass Nature’s Compass gives you a new item - the titular Nature’s Compass - which you can craft by surrounding a regular compass with logs and saplings. Right-clicking this improved compass brings up a list of every biome type, and clicking on one will detect the nearest biome of that type and guide you towards its location. Indispensable for exploring the right biomes to see Bees, Goats, and other biome-specific Minecraft mobs.
Corail Tombstone
Minecraft version: 1.19 | Download Corail Tombstone Minecraft mods have been providing death chests and other variants of the same concept for years now, but few do it as stylishly as Corail Tombstone, which heaps all your belongings into a nearby tombstone when you die. With all sorts of gravestone customisation options, both visual and functional, you can set Corail Tombstone up to work exactly how you want, and never again have to suffer the indescribable pain of losing your entire expedition’s worth of ores and materials with one careless wrong step. A fantastic companion for when you’re digging deep underground to find Diamonds, or embarking on a Nether expedition to gather Netherite, Potion ingredients, or the items you need to challenge the Wither boss.
Waystones
Minecraft version: 1.19 | Download Waystones If you’ve been playing Valheim recently and lament the fact that vanilla Minecraft doesn’t give you the ability to instantly teleport to different areas, then Waystones is the mod for you. This mod allows you to craft Waystones and give them tags, then teleport to them either with one-use scrolls or a Warpstone, or by interacting with another Waystone elsewhere.
Best Minecraft building mods
WorldEdit
Minecraft version: 1.19 | Download WorldEdit WorldEdit is the ultimate building and construction tool for Minecraft, full stop. With a tremendously powerful series of different commands and tools available to you in Creative Mode, WorldEdit is all but necessary for the timely creation of vast Minecraft builds, from adventure maps to colossal structures and landscapes, and pretty much anything else you can think of. Using Minecraft commands you can create, copy, and paste different blueprints; you can select and fill areas, create shapes such as cylinders and spheres of any size on the fly, and so much more. This makes it easy to make buildings quickly, like a cloud-scraping Minecraft tower.
Chisels and Bits
Minecraft version: 1.18.2 | Download Chisels and Bits Chisels and Bits is a powerful mod which gives players access to various chisel tools, with which you can carve individual blocks down, pixel by pixel, into any shape your heart desires. There’s no end to what you can accomplish with the Chisel tool, from decorative statues and blocks for your castle to physically etched signs and much more. It’s the perfect way to add new challenge and possibility into your latest Minecraft house ideas.
Best Minecraft quality of life mods
Useful Backpacks
Minecraft version: 1.19 | Download Useful Backpacks A simple, lightweight, and brilliant mod, Useful Backpacks allows you to craft three levels of backpack, each of which gives you extra inventory storage space. There are many mods out there that give you increased inventory slots and the like, but none of them fit in with Minecraft’s aesthetic and style like Useful Backpacks does. Of course, with the arrival of Minecraft 1.18 we saw Bundles incorporated into vanilla Minecraft, but they’re not nearly as powerful as the backpacks you’ll be able to create using this mod.
Iron Chests
Minecraft version: 1.19 | Download Iron Chests Iron Chests is another mod with a name that gives you a suitable idea of its purpose. But what you might not have expected is that this mod actually gives you a whole array of new types of chest for storing your items inside, each built out of a different material (Iron, Gold, Diamond, Obsidian), each able to hold more items than the last or giving you extra benefits, such as explosion resistance with the Obsidian Chest. A very handy mod for hoarders.
HWYLA
Minecraft version: 1.16.5 | Download HWYLA What HWYLA does, quite simply, is give you a little tooltip when you hover your reticule over literally any world item or block, telling you exactly what it is (and, if you like, which mod it comes from). One of the most lightweight Minecraft mods in this list, it’s also right up there for the most essential and useful. Whis this not just part of vanilla Minecraft by now?
Inventory Sorter
Minecraft version: 1.19 | Download Inventory Sorter Inventory Sorter is a lightweight addon that adds two very simple but very useful mechanics to organising items in inventories or chests. The first: clicking the middle mouse button in an inventory will auto-sort all items inside. The second: you can mousewheel scroll over an item stack in order to move the item one at a time into your inventory, or vice versa. You owe it to yourself to just use this mod all the time until it’s added to Minecraft by default.
FastWorkbench
Minecraft version: 1.18.2 | Download FastWorkbench For players who played Minecraft before version 1.12, you will likely remember crafting being much more responsive than it’s been since. FastWorkbench looks to increase the responsiveness of crafting items in a crafting table, along with disabling the recipe book to increase performance and the speed with which you can log in to your game. A lightweight, must-have mod in my book, alongside the Placebo mod which FastWorkbench requires to work.
SwingThroughGrass
Minecraft version: 1.18.1 | Download SwingThroughGrass Say it with me now: long grass sucks. And apparently there are many who share this opinion, because SwingThroughGrass has become one of the most downloaded Minecraft mods. Quite simply, this mod allows you to swing a sword or other weapon through long grass, preventing that super-irritating issue of the swing being interrupted by the long grass for no reason whatsoever.
FastLeafDecay
Minecraft version: 1.19 | Download FastLeafDecay Here’s a mod I never knew I needed in my life. FastLeafDecay does exactly what it says on the tin, significantly reducing the time it takes for a trunk-less tree to despawn all its leaf blocks. Instead of waiting a minute or more, the whole process is over in less than two seconds. It’s very satisfying, and certainly nicer when you’re farming for saplings or apples.
AppleSkin
Minecraft version: 1.19 | Download AppleSkin Can you say with any certainty that you 100% understand the saturation mechanic in Minecraft? I can now, and it’s all thanks to AppleSkin. Not only does this super-useful little mod tell you how much hunger a food item will replenish when you hover over it, but it’ll also give you the saturation level of each item too - a stat which Minecraft hides by default. And with that, I think we’ll wrap up this Minecraft mods discussion. That’s quite a hefty array of mods to be getting on with anyway - some of which quite significantly change the game, but most of which simply make Minecraft a little easier and more pleasant to get along with. If you want to change the look of your Minecraft game more than the way it plays, then take a look at our list of the best Minecraft texture packs.
