Minecraft Vanilla Mods That Help You to Have a Better Survival Experience

Minecraft survival is one of the most popular gamemodes people are still playing to this day. Whether you are playing with your friends on a server or playing in your survival world, you may know that there are many ways to enhance your survival experience. For example, by using resource packs, shaders, mods, etc… but when it comes to Minecraft mods, people think of modifications that change Minecraft survival gameplay, adding new mobs and items to the game. But actually, this shouldn’t be the case for client-sided mods. What are client-side mods? Well, the mods that only change how you can play the game (it only affects you, not other people on a server for example) without changing or adding anything new to the basic Minecraft gameplay, like how texture packs or the shaders just change the appearance of the game to make it look more pleasing. This also applies to the vanilla mods that will be covered in this article. But instead of changing things you see, these mods will change things you can do in-game better.

Now that we know not all mods change the basic premise of the game, I’m going to introduce a few vanilla mods that you should be already using on your survival plays. Why and what if Fabric you may ask? FabricMC describes itself as “A lightweight, experimental modding toolchain for Minecraft”, similar to other well-known mod loaders like Forge. All of the mods mentioned below are available for Fabric and most of them may also be available for Forge, but the primary discussion about these mods will be about Fabric because it has its own benefits and all the mods are available with Fabric. Also, we’re not going to discuss which mod loader is better since this is not the main focus of this article. Note: Make sure to also check out the mods from their respective sources, so you could get more information and have better showcases.

0. Prerequisites (Fabric API, Forge) If you install Fabric as a loader, for many mods you’d still need a mod while using Fabric that’s named “Fabric API”. Yes, that might sound a bit confusing. Because Fabric is a lightweight mod loader, for some mods there’s nothing to do more. Sodium is a popular example of a mod that doesn’t require Fabric API mod to utilize its features. Most of the mods here require the API mod to function. Not to mention some of the mods have their own requirements and libraries as separate mods, which means a mod may need other mods to work properly. If you’ve been using Forge, then you’re good to go. The only thing you should do is to match the mods to the supported Forge version, which sometimes could get annoying.

1. Mod Menu (Fabric Only) These days, Minecraft mods aren’t just simple mods. They are advanced and highly customizable to have more features inside them. Many mods (like almost every mod) have their own configs which you can change in their folders. But you don’t want to go to your computer files, looking for configurations and changing values with notepad or other external file editing tools. It’s when you should and I mean should have this mod. Mod Menu lets you see what Fabric mods are loaded to your game and configure them in-game. If you use Fabric mods then it’s almost a requirement for you to have this mod. Because, unlike Forge, Fabric doesn’t have its own menu for mods. You can download the mod from here.

2. Inventory Profiles Next You probably have come across people who don’t manage their inventory and storage slots very well. This is a great issue since that causes you a lot of struggle to find the item you are looking for or place items when your inventory is full. Now let me tell you that this mod does the job of inventory management with a simple click. With the Inventory Profiles Next mod, you can sort out your items, hop matching or all of your items to the storage or vice versa, place blocks continuously without the need of opening your inventory and putting items in your hotbar, and many many more features! This mod is very very customizable in terms of features that you’d like to have on your Minecraft experience. For example, newly picked up items will go in your first inventory slot instead of the hotbar. If you’re not used to that, you can set “Pick Items Directly into the Inventory” to false in its configuration. Also, this mod requires Fabric Language Kotlin (or Kotlin for Forge) in order to work from the first place. Here’s the link to download the mod.

3. Mouse Tweaks This mod saves you a lot of clicks that your mouse has to take in its entire lifetime. It does simple tweaks like Shift+holding the left mouse button to continuously move items, though these tweaks are still configurable. Just imagine you want 12 items out of a stack of 64 in your chest, why pick up the entire stack, right-clicking until you got the amount you needed, then put it back to its place when you can just hover on the item and use your mouse wheel to get that item? Truly a time (and click) saver. You can download this mod from here.

4. Shulker Box Tooltip There are times when you can’t trust your memory. You’re looking for an item that you know is somewhere in your Shulker boxes, you’ve even named and colorized that Shulker box, but you can’t just be quite sure about it and what you do, wasting your precious time, putting down your Shulker boxes, finding your items then picking up the Shulker boxes back in your inventory. Seriously, you don’t have to do all of this! Just by using this mod, you can see every item in your Shulker box just by hovering your mouse cursor over it! This mod is also more customizable than you think. For instance, I’ve enabled “Always On” in its configuration, so I have the compact preview as always shown and if I’ve ever wanted to see the details about each slot of that Shulker box, I can just hold down Shift for more details. Download this amazing mod from here.

5. Inventory Tabs (Fabric Only) Tired of going for each storage, spamming the E button & right-clicking to finally find what you want? Then this time-consuming process (of clicking more buttons) can be done faster by pressing the Tab key. Yeah, you can access all of the containers around you without closing your GUI. It’s a simple yet another quality of life-changing mod that just makes your job easier. This mod even supports custom names and if you put an item frame to that block, the tab on your GUI would show that item. This mod was originally made by kqp_ but didn’t get any updates for Minecraft versions 1.17 and above. You can still check out the original mod here. The ported version for newer Minecraft is also linked and you can give it a try.

There are a lot of other mods that would let you have a better Minecraft survival experience. Mods like Apple Skin or Enchantment Descriptions provide more information while playing the game rather than referring to external resources. Mods like Journey Map, which is among the most popular mods of all time and makes playing Minecraft easier to find and memorize places, are also the ones that you can use without your server having it installed. I, as the writer of this article, personally have decided to use Fabric for these mods, but it’s up to you readers to choose what mods and mod loaders you want to choose. There are tons of mods available for everyone at CurseForge, the oldest and still the best source for Minecraft mods, for absolutely free. I have tried this article to support mods universally and there is no intention to force you to use and conclude which one is better.