COMING SEP 1st - 🧐The Clarity Update [Available now for Pack Testers]

🧪 Members with the Pack Tester role are able to download the Preview for this update right now by selecting it in the Download Hub:

No More Blur

Might need to pull out the microscope for this one 🔬

With the bedrock port only two days away, I've been working on preparing the various resolution options for download. I decided to take this opportunity to re-assess how textures are downscaled in the pack; Java Edition included.

As a quick refresher, there are two main ways to downscale an image:

Anti-alising is extremely common (in fact, necessary) in most games, as it allows images to appear smoother than they actually are. This works great for high-res images, but creates a significant "blurry" effect when applied to lower res images that would be better off left leaning more towards a pixel-art look.

For a while, every texture in the pack used anti-aliasing. This helped the higher resolutions like 128x and 256x look a bit smoother, but at the cost of muddying up the lower 32x and 64x resolution options.

In an update earlier this year, I actually removed the anti-aliasing from items in all versions of the pack, as they were clearly the worst offenders. However up until this point blocks have remained anti-aliased.

I was a bit on the fence about making the switch with blocks, as it created a pretty noticeable stylistic difference, especially at the lower resolutions. Just to be sure it was the right call, I threw up some polls on my socials, and received almost unanimous feedback that the non anti-aliased versions of the textures were preferred. So.. here they are!

I think this change goes a long way for consistency across the pack. Textures in the high-res pack consist of solid clear-cut blocks of color, so it was a bit off that the lower res versions of those same textures were smooth and blended. Not to mention the fact that the heightmaps and other PBR features were also anti-aliased up until this point, creating curved edges along the textures' parallax, as well as other unintentional effects.

New Website Out of Beta

With the launch of this preview, the update to the website / download hub has officially left beta. The legacy site has been retired, and will no longer be accessible.

You shouldn't run into any bugs, but if you do, ask for help in the Discord and we'll get it sorted out.