Minecraft 1.18/1.17.1 Mods – Download the best Minecraft Mods of 2020

The Minecraft community, amassing over 91 million users, is not only the second largest gaming community on the planet; it has also taken advantage Minecraft’s flexibility to customize it with amazing mods that add new creatures, visual flair, and even options that don’t exist in the original game.
Do you want to know what the Best Minecraft 1.18/1.17.1 Mods bring to the table? Keep reading to find out.

What are the Best Minecraft 1.18/1.17.1 Mods?

For our money, here are the best of the best Minecraft mods, the ones that have more dramatically changed players’ experience and unleashed the game’s incredible possibilities.

1. Optifine

One of the most popular Minecraft 1.16 mod, Optifine fills your game with subtle (and not so subtle) improvements and configuration options that feel like natural features that vanilla Minecraft should already have.

Optifine empowers you to configure lights, fog, clouds, weather effects, the sky, the water, animations, antialiasing, FPS, render distance, as well as to install shader packs, HD textures and custom fonts. It also generally makes the grass, snow, water and terrains look more natural and beautiful.

This fantastic mod also has the distinction of introducing two incredibly useful features that Minecraft bafflingly doesn’t have from the start: an autosave option and configurable fullscreen resolution. If you configure these things right, you’ll experience fantastic resolution and also the relief of not having to save every 10 minutes, so you don’t lose a ton of progress.

2. Minecraft Forge

Minecraft along with the forge

Minecraft Forge is not technically a mod, but it is essential for most things modding in Minecraft. It is a modding API (Application Programming Interface) and loader, which means it is both a tool for creating mods and an add-on for Minecraft to be able to load mods.

Most Minecraft mods are made with Forge, which means ideally most will be compatible with each other. Some mods in this very list only work when Forge is installed. Forge, as a mod development tool, expands Minecraft’s possibilities to whatever your creativity and Java coding prowess can achieve; it has no interface itself, but rather an incredibly powerful set of commands. As a loader, it creates a Mods folder inside your Minecraft folder where you can install compatible mods that you download.

Be careful to install the right Forge version to your Minecraft, and to keep Java up to date as much as possible.

3. Shaders Mod

Let’s face it: Optifine improves Minecraft’s graphics in some helpful ways, but it’s far from visually stunning. That’s where the Shaders Mod comes in: a legendary set of some of the best visual revampings Minecraft has ever seen. These are:

• KUDA Shaders
• DocteurDread’s Shader
• Sildur’s Shaders
• Sonic Ether’s Unbelievable Shaders (SEUS)
• MrMeepz’ Shaders
• Riisee Shaders
• Chocapic13’s Shaders

These shader mods (mods that change the way Minecraft’s graphics look) were once upon a time only available through the Shaders Mod. This has since changed, and you can get and install them individually, but still, nowadays, this holds up as a substantial selection of some of the best Minecraft 1.14 shaders out there.

Also, lest you think Optifine is made obsolete by the existence of these shaders, having Optifine installed is the first step to installing all of these. You can select the one you want to try by launching Minecraft, pressing Esc, the going to Options, Graphics, then Shaders.

4. Mo’ Creatures

If you’ve ever ridden a horse in Minecraft, you can thank DrZhark’s Mo’ Creatures mod for that. A legendary mod that now offers over 58 mobs (mobile units, creatures), ranging from animals to humanoids to mythical monsters, the Mo’Creatures mod is so popular and influential that the horse mob was included in vanilla Minecraft with assistance from Mo’ Creatures developers.

It’s not just horses, though. Mo’ Creatures enriches your Minecraft experience by including several creatures to tame, fight or admire, fully realized with exclusive AI and animations. You can ride a mighty Pegasus, put a chest on a tamed bear, breed some ostriches, fish some crabs for meat, fight a werewolf, and even craft new weapons, tools and armour from the items these mobs drop.

Mo’ Creatures even includes a whole new dimension called the Wyvern Lair, with seven new blocks, and an upcoming one called the Ogre Lair!

5. Pixelmon

If Mo’ Creatures takes your Minecraft on a safari, Pixelmon takes you on a Pokémon safari! Pixelmon adds over 800 of the ever-popular pocket monsters from all generations, along with a functioning Pokédex, a combat system straight from the handheld Pokémon games, Poké-Balls you can use to catch wild critters, a trading system, and a gigantic assortment of new items, machines, tools, armour, plants and decorations to create and play around your Pokémon world.

This mod combines the best of Minecraft and Pokémon: you can harvest resources both vanilla and mod-specific, which you can then use to craft Pokéballs, items, machines, and even stones to evolve your Pokémon. You can breed them, level them up, and some Pokémon you can de-fossilize and even craft. Each critter comes with exclusive animations and is found in different biomes, so have fun exploring and finding your favourites!

6. Lucky Block

A lot of the fun in Minecraft comes from random chance. You can explore and randomly encounter blocks, mobs and even items of all kinds. The Lucky Block mod adds an extra wild-card to that equation: a single block, modelled to look like the “?” blocks from Super Mario Bros., that you can craft and, upon breaking, can unleash any lucky or unlucky mayhem.

The Lucky Block itself is crafted from gold ingots (that aren’t useful for much else anyway) and a furnace. It can spawn any number of monsters, animals, items, resources and even structures (with yet more Lucky Blocks!).

The Lucky Block can have different “luck levels”, which you can increase by adding more gold ingots yet when crafting it. The mod also includes other random features like wishing wells, luck potions, enchantment books, some new fun mobs, and a ridiculous sense of humour.

7. Voxelmap

One of those mods that feel so natural you’ll wonder why it’s not vanilla, Voxelmap adds a mini-map to your screen that will help you explore above and below ground. It has per-dimension waypoints, icons to display the player and nearby mobs, environment-accurate colours and even an option to overlay a chunk grid or biomes. Behind are the days of getting hopelessly lost in the vastness of Minecraft with the powerful mini-map from Voxelmap.

Voxelmap includes some neat functionality like coordinates, displaying the terrain’s height, a mark on the site of your last death and a cave mode that can help you navigate mines and caverns. You can use the mini-map to view your surroundings or the entire explored world, and you can explore it by clicking, dragging and zooming with your mouse.

Mainly, Voxelmap presents your Minecraft explorer with a much-needed set of map and compass. Explore away!

How to install the Best Minecraft Mods 1.18/1.17.1

Follow the next couple of steps to install the best Minecraft mods:

• For Optifine, download the installer and run it. It will install itself correctly.
• For Minecraft Forge, download the version-appropriate installer and run it as Administrator. You can choose to install the client or server, which depends on how you want to play. When you launch Minecraft, select Forge.
• For the Shaders Mod, make sure you have the latest version of Optifine installed. Then copy the files for the Shaders Mod inside the “.minecraft/Shaderpacks” folder.
• For Mo’Creatures, Pixelmon, Lucky Block and Voxelmap make sure you have the Minecraft Forge installed. Locate the “Mods” Folder, and copy the .jar file into it.
• Launch Minecraft, go to mods, and you should find the mods you want to be installed.

We also have a detailed tutorial on how to install minecraft mods.