Vanilla RTX

Vanilla RTX is the best known PBR pack for Minecraft RTX, and its whole purpose is to unlock ray tracing without changing how the game looks. Instead of new textures, it supplies the material maps and fog settings that ray tracing needs, so light, reflections and shadows start behaving realistically while every block keeps the face you know.

What the Pack Covers

The work here is about completeness rather than flash:

• Every vanilla block is supported, including creative, Education Edition and unobtainable ones.


• Materials stay consistent between blocks made of the same stuff.


• Each texture keeps its original style and function instead of being reinterpreted.


• Known compatibility problems between vanilla resources and ray tracing have been fixed.


• Support for the Copper Age drop is included.

How the Detail Is Built

Vanilla RTX describes each surface with 16x heightmaps paired with detailed MER maps, which carry the metallic, emissive and roughness values for every block. That combination is what tells the renderer which surfaces should shine, which should glow and which should swallow light, and it is why polished stone and rough dirt no longer react to a torch in the same way.

Worth remembering: this is a pack for ray tracing specifically. With RTX turned off it does very little, and with it on the difference is hard to miss.