Pixel Daydreams Resource Pack 1.18 / 1.17

There are plenty of resource packs that claim to be inspired by pixel art. Such claims rarely live up to expectations, as Minecraft is already a game that relies on pixel art for its visuals. Trying to make Minecraft even more loyal to this art style is a creatively demanding task, and not everyone will succeed despite their bold claims. Pixel Daydreams is one example of a resource pack that claims to be inspired by pixel art and tweaks the colors and textures in Minecraft to be more in line with that art style. Surprisingly, Pixel Daydreams Source Pack it manages to achieve a visual art style that’s actually closer to pixel art than vanilla Minecraft, and it does it in style. Pixel Daydreams has an interesting origin story. The source pack was released around Christmas 2013. It wasn’t complete and isn’t complete now, but it brought a lot of visual changes to make vanilla Minecraft even more alive, bright and fun. Not long after release, original developer Steelfeathers abandoned the project. It was his first project and he abandoned the idea of ​​keeping it up to date. Sadly, the Pixel Daydreams source pack managed to gain a reasonable following in the community when further development was abandoned. Fortunately, community user Sassafrassanid took up the development and updates and published the first update in 2021. He has continued to release updates for the resource pack to keep it relevant. Pixel Daydreams manages to achieve a lot in terms of visual upgrades without changing anything in terms of texture resolution. The source pack still uses 16x textures, meaning we get the same amount of detail. However, it does change the textures to such an extent that anyone can tell that this is not vanilla Minecraft.

The first thing you’ll notice when loading Pixel Daydreams is the increased contrast. Some textures, such as those of grass, leaves, and other types of green terrain, are simply greener. Blocks like clay, sand, rocks, etc. have much more intense colors. The colors have been altered to such an extent that they actually look like they were inspired by pixel art, but without being overly cartoonish. The color selection is so good that it makes vanilla Minecraft look dull and dated. In total, about 50% of all textures in Minecraft have been updated, reworked, or recolored in Pixel Daydreams, with additional textures added via updates from a community member who captured the development in the resource pack. In addition to regularly updating the terrain and environment textures, the original developer also replaced the original textures of ores and things like wood, ladders, bricks, chests, doors and more. All of these new textures highlight the pixel art inspired visuals. Another aspect of the game that was changed was the player’s HUD and GUI. The inventory, menus, crafting screens, and player HUD have been changed to more closely match the art style of the game’s textures. Inventory item icons have not changed. The same goes for weapons and armor, which also remained unchanged. What was changed were some textures for the mobs. The Pixel Daydreams resource pack is a PvP friendly pack. It doesn’t affect game performance in any way because it uses the same 16x texture resolution. It also doesn’t add dynamic textures, meaning the game will run the same with or without the resource pack installed. What the resource pack doesn’t do is add more detail to the textures. Running at standard 16x resolution means you can’t add more detail to textures compared to the detail on vanilla Minecraft textures. There are only so many pixels that fit on a 16x resolution texture.