Hey everyone! Cubeir here,
I've been actively working on Vanilla RTX for the last 5 years. A project that aimed to, and today largely achieves a comprehensive canonical look for Minecraft RTX — The goal was always to imagine a deservedly native RTX resource pack.
Vanilla RTX resource packs are currently up-to-date and feature complete for the latest version of the game, and I intend to continue to maintain them for the foreseeable future.
That said Minecraft's ray tracing has been fundamentally getting more and more broken since its release (though the same could be said for bugrock as a whole), which required some action.
Enabling RTX became insanely difficult due to persistent bugs, which Mojang has been refusing to fix for 1-3 years and in some cases for 4 years now. These issues were reported, confirmed and voted on by tens of people... yet Mojang never paid a shred of attention, forcing everyone to go through 5 paragraphs of unholy rituals and execute convoluted workarounds just to get it working.
I've been documenting these issues and their workarounds publicly and keeping them updated on Vanilla RTX's download pages, but they're easy to miss, and you can't just expect everyone to read all that, right? This was all on top of having to manually dig online to find a working RTX pack that may or may not be up-to-date.
So...
I built the ultimate companion app for Minecraft RTX that fixes the situation! and arguably makes it far easier than ever before to keep playing with ray tracing at its best on the latest versions of Minecraft Bedrock.
Announcing the Vanilla RTX App! Now officially available on the Microsoft Store, it is a rebrand of Vanilla RTX Tuner which I announced 6 months ago, the name change came recently after extensive rewrites and a UI redesign. There is also a trailer, watch it here!
Everything you're ever going to need to unlock the full potential of Minecraft RTX and use it without having to deal with any hurdles has been brought here, together in one place.
Here's an overview of its core features:
- Launches Minecraft with RTX pre-enabled — No fighting bugs, no more steps to follow. One button, and the game will be launched with ray tracing properly enabled, you will still need to activate a ray tracing resource pack before joining a world, fortunately, the app already supplies Vanilla RTX updates:
- Automatically downloads and updates Vanilla RTX from its official GitHub repository. No more third-party sites and no more outdated packs. The app caches everything locally for quick reinstalls and checks for updates once in a while.
- Gives you powerful tools to tune any RTX or even Vibrant Visuals resource pack according to your preferences -- that's right, the app is no longer just compatible with Vanilla RTX. Adjust fog density, emissive intensity, normal map strength, and various material properties, There are guardrails designed to protect the artist's original work, making it extremely difficult to spoil the original PBR properties, that said, I recommend experimenting freely on Vanilla RTX first, since you can reset and reiterate fast by reinstalling from within the app.
- DLSS Swapper, allows you to create your own catalogue of DLSS dlls and easily swap them at any time, your default/current DLL is always added to the catalogue so you won't ever lose anything!
- BetterRTX Manager / Installer, works similarly to DLSS Swapper but installs BetterRTX instead, allows you to swiftly switch between presets, import .rtpacks from the BetterRTX website.
- There is more, read the full documentation
Downloads:
Footnotes:
The app only updates and reinstalls primary Vanilla RTX resource packs for you.
If you're using other packs, you can export them before tuning as a way of backing them up.
That said, tuning is optional, they're tools, what you should do however is to launch the game through the app at least once and avoid disabling ray tracing.
Once in a while you might see news of app or pack updates appear inside the app, urging to reinstall Vanilla RTX (which will automatically update it) or update the app via Microsoft store if necessary. That way you won't be left alone!
For suggestions/issue reports or help use GitHub issues or ping me at Minecraft RTX Discord server
-- I plan on providing long-term support for it alongside Vanilla RTX.
As for what the future holds this time, I might be trying to integrate BetterRTX into the app for ease of access and to solidify everything in one place, though in terms of core features, the app itself is now complete after a year of development. (BetterRTX has been integrated!)
P.S.
Vanilla RTX's Enhanced option is now absorbed into the base pack (no more subpack selection!). Which means fixes and visual upgrades for Minecraft RTX are now enabled by default, development folder files on GitHub remain unmerged if you ever want raw Vanilla RTX.
If Mojang ever fixes all ray tracing bugs by some miracle, a Vanilla RTX App update will stop merging Enhancements, for that I've kept the workflows clean, never lose hope!
That is everything from me. Have fun!
