The Best Minecraft mods

What are the best Minecraft mods in 2026? The best Minecraft mods help you take your game to another level, providing you with an entirely new experience. Whether you love creative building, terrifying survival, or speed-running the story, we’ve got the mods for you. We’ve even thrown in interface mods and tools to make things easier, too.

We’ve listed all the best Minecraft mods below, including the best horror Minecraft mods, performance mods, and more, depending on what you want to do with the sandbox game. If you’re brand new to the modding scene, you can jump to the bottom to learn how to install Minecraft mods.

Skyland AIO (All-in-One)

Essentially Enhanced is a client-side modpack dedicated to amazing optimization and great looks. It is designed in collaboration with Essentially Optimized to deliver the greatest performance boost out of all the modpacks while also making Minecraft look better.

Thanks to the collaboration with Essentially Optimized, this pack outperforms other similar Quality Of Life & Visual modpacks.

If you have no idea how to install a mod

Skyland AIO (All-in-One)

Essentially Enhanced is a client-side modpack dedicated to amazing optimization and great looks. It is designed in collaboration with Essentially Optimized to deliver the greatest performance boost out of all the modpacks while also making Minecraft look better.

Thanks to the collaboration with Essentially Optimized, this pack outperforms other similar Quality Of Life & Visual modpacks.

If you have no idea how to install a mod

Skyland AIO (All-in-One)

Essentially Enhanced is a client-side modpack dedicated to amazing optimization and great looks. It is designed in collaboration with Essentially Optimized to deliver the greatest performance boost out of all the modpacks while also making Minecraft look better.

Thanks to the collaboration with Essentially Optimized, this pack outperforms other similar Quality Of Life & Visual modpacks.

If you have no idea how to install a mod

Optifine

Make Minecraft look incredible with Optifine, perhaps the most essential Minecraft mod. Optifine adds support for HD textures and more control over graphical options. You’ll likely need Optifine installed before you can run Minecraft shaders, but even on its own, it provides dynamic lighting, improved textures, and a performance boost.

Optifine should be fine on most PC setups, but if you’re playing on a potato, grab Fastcraft instead. It significantly improves performance on lower-end machines, particularly with lots of Minecraft mods installed.

Better Caves

After playing Minecraft for hundreds, if not thousands of hours, you will start to recognize how the game generates the world. Once that illusion has been shattered, things inevitably start to feel boring. That’s where Yung’s Better Caves mod comes in, providing a new way to reexperience the mystery of exploring caves. You’ll find underground lakes, flooded caverns, and lava-filled pools, among other things, in this essential Minecraft mod.

Hole Filler

Arguably one of the best mods for anyone who hates messy environments, the Hole Filler mod from DannyBoyThomas instantly fills any holes that you have in your world. This is particularly useful after a creeper attack that has left the environment in ruins; now you can throw a Hole Filler into the chasm and immediately repair the damage.

Journeymap

With Journeymap, your map opens up as you explore, and you can view it on a full-screen map and a minimap, both of which are super customizable. While there are more Minecraft tools for finding your way than ever, from the recovery compass to the Lodestone, it’s still incredibly helpful to have a full map at your disposal.

Better Combat

The Better Combat mod has taken inspiration from Minecraft Dungeon’s combat animations, adding some much-needed flair to Steve’s fighting skills. With this mod, your Minecraft avatar can now swing, jab, and slice any which way you like. With a range of one-handed, two-handed, and even dual-wielding attack animations included, your fighting style has never looked or felt better.

Fisk’s Superheroes

Fisk’s Superheroes provides you with superhero suits, each loaded with its own special powers, granting you super-speed, the ability to fire energy beams, and much more. And if you’ve ever wanted to explore the wilderness in the comfort of an ultra-modern, bleeding-edge, and rather famous suit, then the Iron Maniac Heropack is the Fisk add-on for you. This texture pack adds Tony Stark’s iconic suits to your game, including Mark I-V and even the original War Machine armor, as long as you’ve got Fisk’s installed as well.

Mouse Tweaks

When you’re an expert Minecraft player, you should know all the tricks of the trade to get the job done as fast as possible. With the Mouse Tweaks mod, you can add a whole new set of shortcuts to your arsenal with a revamped right-click dragging mechanic, new left-click dragging tricks, and tweaks to the scroll wheel.

Botania

If you’re wildly enthusiastic about magic and nature, then don’t sleep on the Botania Minecraft mod. Using the power of the earth, you can grow new mystical flowers and magical devices that can be used for automation. In comparison to other automation mods like Immersive Engineering, Botania is more natural, so if you prefer dirt to metal, this is the engineering mod for you.

Parasites

More than a Minecraft mod, Parasites from Forge Labs feels like an entirely separate horror-survival game. Dropped into a post-apocalyptic world filled with new monstrous mobs, Parasites challenges you to survive the overworld with limited resources as you scavenge and fight. Not only does the survival gameplay play out brilliantly, but this mod looks fantastic too, from its new monsters to its terrifying biomes.

Aquaculture 2

If you love a bit of peaceful fishing in Minecraft but are tired of pulling up the same salmon and cod, then give Aquaculture 2 a try. This Minecraft mod adds over 30 new fish, the ability to fish while swimming, new fishing rods, bobbins, and bait. There’s also an incredible new treasure loot table for fishing, which includes the mod’s own Neptunium tools and armor.

Dungeons Enhanced

Minecraft has always been fairly limited in terms of the structures or dungeons you can happen upon in the open-world game. It stands to reason, then, that this could get repetitive. Enter the Dungeons Enhanced mod. This mod adds new dungeons and structures, increasing the total types to 21, and they all fit a medieval or fantasy theme. You’ll soon be stumbling upon huge mazes, castles, or even a pyramid.

Nature’s Compass

Nature’s Compass and the Explorer’s Compass can be used to find any biome you’re after. Use the compass to bring up a list of biomes, select the one you want, and follow your compass. Shift-right-click to reset the compass to world spawn, or choose a new biome to change its direction. It’s as simple as that and feels a little less like cheating. The Explorer’s Compass works in the same way, leading you to structures instead of biomes.

Ars Nouveau

The massive magical Ars Nouveau mod brings an incredible array of new features to Minecraft, allowing you to perform rituals to invoke weather patterns, craft your own spells to aid your survival, and even summon magical mobs to use in automation.

Cave Dweller

Do you think the Minecraft Warden is scary? Well, it’s the least of your underground problems with this terrifying mod enabled. The Cave Dweller mod introduces the dark entity that follows you around as you explore the adventure game’s caves. While the Cave Dweller can’t sneak up on you, the spooky noises it makes grow louder as it approaches you, so you won’t be caught out completely unaware.

Gargin’s Cave Dweller mod is so popular that other modders have been adding to it, making it even more terrifying. If you somehow want even more scares, give Cave Dweller Evolved or Better Cave Dweller a try.

Tinkers’ Construct

That, up there, that’s a floating Slime island. Just one of the cool features of the Tinkers’ Construct mod. In Tinkers’ Construct, one of the best tool mods around, slime is an essential resource. There’s new slime, there are slime islands, and you can use them all to create smelteries and manufacture a range of new items, tools, and gear. There’s even slimy plantlife.

Decocraft

If you’d like a bit more variety when it comes to decorating your Minecraft house, Decocraft is the Minecraft building mod for you. It adds around 3,000 new customization items, including craftable chairs, tables, bowls, bottles, lamps, stuffed toys, beer kegs, and even a kitchen sink. To keep up to date with all those items and any new additions, you can join the mod’s official Discord.

How to install Minecraft mods

There are several ways to install Minecraft mods, depending on whether you want to install a management app or implement each mod individually. It might also depend on the mod itself, so check individual mod pages for specific instructions, for example, BetterEnd can only be installed via Fabric.

To install Minecraft mods using a mod manager:

• Download your chosen mod manager. We recommend Modrinth, Forge, Fabric, or Curseforge.
• Open your chosen launcher, and find and install mods within the app.
• Create separate profiles to load multiple mods at once.
• Load Minecraft through your mod manager.

The benefit to this option is that you can see all your downloaded mods in one place, and group them together into mod packs easily. It’s also much easier to run more than one mod at once through a manager.

To install Minecraft mods manually:

• Download your chosen mods using the links above.
• Unzip files, and move unzipped files into your Minecraft mods folder.
• Launch Minecraft.
• If you are unsure where to find your Minecraft folder, type %appdata% into your search bar, and find the folder named .minecraft.

Hopefully, with all those mods to choose from, you’re ready to get lost in Minecraft all over again. If you need a handy tool to manage your mods, our guide to installing and using Minecraft Forge will help you organize your modding needs and the best Minecraft seeds to pair them with. If that’s still not enough diversity from the vanilla game, check out our list of the best crafting games on PC.