Minecraft Java Edition is upgrading to Vulkan, but it's not great news for mods

Mojang warned that many popular mods will be affected by this change and wants to help mod authors port over their work.

It has been nine years since OpenGL stopped receiving updates, and Minecraft maker Mojang is finally planning to move away from it. Today, the Microsoft-owned studio announced that to both keep supporting all platforms and to finally bring the Vibrant Visuals enhancements to the Java edition of the game, it is making the switch to the Vulkan graphics API.

Mojang says that on top of the looming deprecation of OpenGL on macOS, maintaining the Java codebase using OpenGL has been an increasingly difficult task. While the API had helped the studio run the title across all supported operating systems, the studio explained that "it’s time for us to transition away from OpenGL and switch to something new."

While Windows and Linux machines, with GPUs that are less than 10 years old, can run Vulkan just fine, macOS doesn't officially support this API either. To remedy this, Mojang says it will employ a translation layer that will run Vulkan-based Minecraft on macOS systems "without performance penalties."

One major pain point players and creators may run into with this switch is with modding.

"Switching from OpenGL to Vulkan will have an impact on the mods that currently use OpenGL for rendering, and we anticipate that updating from OpenGL to Vulkan will take modders more effort than the updates you undertake for each of our releases," explains Mojang. "To start with, we recommend our modding community look at moving away from OpenGL usage."

The studio asked mod makers to reach out for help if they need to port over their work. The Vibrant Visuals Discord channel is open for mod authors to offer feedback and have more technical discussions with each other and the developers.

"In the long term, the switch to Vulkan will give us more capacity to improve the graphics for Java Edition, bring greater performance capabilities, and will hopefully reduce the number of driver-based bugs players experience," adds Mojang.

Minecraft Vulkan-based snapshots will begin rolling out alongside OpenGL in the summer of 2026, with a toggle available for players to switch between the two. Mojang says it will remove the OpenGL implementation once it's happy with the performance and stability, while also updating the game's minimum requirements.