NJ’s Natural Resource Pack for Minecraft 1.8.9/1.8.8

NJ’s Natural resource pack is like a lot of other natural packs in a couple of ways. For one, it focuses strongly on the natural aspects of Minecraft – trees, grass, dirt and water – rather than the man-made parts of the game, like chiseled bricks. To be fair though, this resource pack does contain some great textures for the various types of cooked stone bricks. Second, many textures get both their normal mapping as well as specular mapping, especially reflective ones like ice. This extra bit of mapping allows for better lighting and shadows, and this simply makes the game world look better in general.

You will probably see a bit of this if you happen to go near any snowy mountain biomes, but the best place to see the nice shading effects would probably be in a taiga, where you can get a large, flat plane of snow. Snow gets talked about a lot here because NJ’s Natural resource pack is only about 20% finished at the time of this review. It’s not even done yet, so it’s kind of hard to judge the thing entirely, but rather easy to look at individual aspects of the pack, like the snow. The 128x resolution is pretty nice but also necessary to provide the crisp, clean textures seen here.

From what can be seen and measured so far, NJ’s Natural resource pack looks pretty good. But it’s still so early in development that it’s impossible to tell if the same level of detail which went into the current textures will go into the rest of the blocks, items and environmental bits as the pack is finished. Like most other resource packs, this one also looks a lot better with a decent shader mod installed.