I CRAFTED My Own UI for the MINES

Minecraft. The blocky game where first you mine and then you craft. This simple mechanic has led to an infinite world of game content and beyond. Since the game's release, Minecraft and its UI evolved more and more with every update. But unfortunately, all of that has not been enough to make a proper consistent UI. I mean, for the bestselling game of all time and a game that everyone's been playing for over 10 years, the UI confusion is kind of embarrassing. I heard the call and I knew that I had to get working. So, I mined through the Java edition, Bedrock Edition, and Pocket UI, plus Minecraft realms to figure out how to craft the one Minecraft UI. Let me know what you think about it in the comments. The same way that Java and Bedrock Editions work on different platforms and have different audiences, they have two completely different UIs, too. Obviously, the layouts have to be different for PC users versus console or mobile users. But that aside, there's a world of difference between their styles, too. Java is more gray, minimal, and kind of classic looking. Bedrock is more playful, colorful, and more often updated. Not to start a Java versus Bedrock war, but I think we could use some consistency between them and all across Minecraft's GUI. I mean, look at their buttons. Java has one style, Bedrock has two. One has a texture on, one doesn't. Maybe we should mix them. Forget about it. It's Minecraft. It has to be 3D with a texture on, but much more playful like this. This is the style I'm going with for all over the UI. And I'm introducing a few more colors and lots of more icons. Now that we have our style set, let's launch Minecraft. The Bedrock Edition has a lot more features that Java doesn't, like the marketplace, profile, friends, and so on. And that's why their menus look completely different. Bedrock is more crowded and Java is simpler and kind of boring. Good thing you can mod it as much as you want, right? First things first, let's change the background. Seriously, there are so many beautiful sceneries in vanilla Minecraft. And this is the one you're going with. For Java, let's change all the buttons to the new style. Then add a little section for the character settings. If you've already played the game, it'll show you a new section to continue playing. This is pretty PC friendly and simple, but maybe a little too simple, even for Java. What if it was more blocky, like a Minecraft world? This way, it's not going to look so empty and boring. It's a game, not a website. For Bedrock, I'll have to craft a more console friendly and playful version of it. I could make some of the buttons larger with pictures inside them to be more stylized and merge the profile and dressing room together. Just trust me for now. The quick access buttons are definitely here, too, plus a little achievement bar for motivating you. Finally, let's put the mandatory marketplace and realms button here shining over the blocks. Now, I'm not going to talk about them in this video, and don't get me wrong, I love extra content, especially the part where I use them, and that's the UI I care about right now. If you purchase something from the marketplace, you literally have to go look for it. Let's say you bought a skin. You would go to the dressing room. Oh, look, ads. Then, navigate to classic skins. Oh, look, more ads. Then go down to see more ads. Find the pack you just bought. Click on this to see all the skins in the pack, then equip the skin you want. What? Alternatively, on the main page of the dressing room, you could add a new character to your character list and go the same route. I'm pretty sure all these pages and confusions are solely to promote the marketplace items because otherwise it could all be way simpler. We could just go to the profile page and instead of it being cut down into two tabs with very little info on each, it could be one simple page with all your statistics and hell even more like how many fish you've caught or trades or animals bred or plants potted. You know, cool stats. Now, we could add tabs for dressing room, achievements, and a screenshot gallery. On the dressing room, there would be a simple library of all your skin packs, emotes, and capes. Now, let's equip this one and go play some Minecraft. I don't know what's happening over in Java, but let's get something straight. Single player and multiplayer are not the best names for these sections. Single player worlds are not necessarily single player because you can invite someone over. Duh. It's just a world, and multiplayer is just servers. So, why don't we create a page exactly like Bedrock with three tabs? worlds, servers, and realms, except with their own new styling. For the world list or server list, it's too much work selecting a world, then clicking delete, edit, or something else. It's really not that difficult putting all the options on each world. Yeah, I'm talking to you, Bedrock. We could also be able to search the worlds or change the view to grid. But Jucks, what if I have a thousand worlds? Well, first, you should consider touching grass. And second, I could add a sorting option for you. Or consider adding tags inside your search to find, let's say, all land enabled creative worlds. Worlds and servers and realms ready. Let's go build a world. The world creation menu is a tricky part of the design. You might want to skip all the settings and create a good old new world immediately. Or you might want to go through every little detail, modify the game, add cheats, and so on. I want to make sure that it has everything for both those times. On Java, the world creation menu was so boring. No, that's not quite the word I'm looking for. It's uninspiring, soul destroying even. And the cherry on top is this interaction right here. I can't do this anymore. What would be so wrong with this? The visuals both make it faster to set the world up and make world building less boring. And I love how there's just no concept of proper description for the settings, like world type. What's this exactly? Nothing. Go figure. Let's fix all that and then shift our attention to the tabs up here. There's game, world, and more. What's more, game rules, experiments, and data packs like mods and stuff, each with a button. Let's hold these for a sec. On Bedrock, you have general, advanced, multiplayer, cheats, resource packs, behavior packs, and experiments. It's great that there are many different categories, but too many categories can also make it hard for you to find certain things. Like the settings that are in advanced are just world settings. And the multiplayer tab is too short to have its own section. Plus, having all the categories be yet another menu that you have to scroll through is ridiculous. So, I'm going to refresh both Bedrock and Java's world creation categories into tabs up here. Let's put all the settings from both editions into four simple tabs. General for the game settings and LAN or multiplayer game settings and so on. World for the world seed, world type, and other world settings. advanced for cheats, game rules and experiments put into collapsible sections. And finally, data packs for Java, and resources for Bedrock. It's a clear design that works well both on PC and on console with the L&R buttons. Well, now that we have everything ready, let's go to the overworld. Wow, what a beautiful world. All right, our adventure begins now. I can't wait to see what awaits us out there. Halt. Brilliant. Today's sponsor has a message for you. Uh, okay. Brilliant makes you smarter every day with thousands of interactive lessons in math, science, and more. Okay. Wow. The way you can play with concepts in each lesson has proven to be six times more effective than watching lectures. Damn. You can learn to understand the world you live in better through the scientific thinking course or strengthen your math through blocky algebra lessons. You can try Brilliant for free for a full 30 days. Just visit brilliant.org/juxapost by clicking on the link in the description or scanning this QR code. You'll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription. Now go punch a tree. Okay, let's go punch a tree first. There is only one way to punch a tree. You want to punch just a few trees like this birch tree over here and then find a cool little cozy place to start crafting your first items. Wood planks. This is your inventory in Java Edition and it's pretty similar in Bedrock 2. It's simple. Probably too simple. Not that it's a bad thing because you have to be quick in it. Now that we have our planks, let's check out our recipe book. You might be the type of player who crafts without a recipe book because you're used to all the combinations, but you still have a book for guidance on unlocked recipes when you need it with an icon that's placed so randomly and doesn't change at all when you open the book. Let's fix that right now. In the book, you can filter out only stuff that you can craft or check out different categories. But beside these, there's no other way to find recipes faster. The search bar doesn't give you anything else beside typing in it either. Forget about autocomplete. It doesn't even have an X button to clear it up fast. I guess Bedrock wins this one since our crafting inventory is not good enough. Let's craft a crafting table. The UI is the same except there's a 3x3 grid and way more recipes, but still only five categories no matter how many items you have. Well, there could be one for all recipes, gear, blocks, items, food, and redstone. Okay, introduction over. Let's build an axe, a pickaxe, and wait. I can't build a shovel, but I have so much wood. What am I missing? What am I missing? Can't you just tell me or at least show the blueprint on hover? Okay, great. I just need two more sticks. You're making it seem like I can't craft it at all. Why are you marking this red? I'm just missing an intermediate item. We could just color code them with red for recipes. I have none of the ingredients for and yellow for recipes. I have some. It might seem trivial right now, but later on when recipes get more difficult, this will come in handy. Now, let's make all the wooden items and go mine some more trees and flowers. One eternity later. A hi little bee. The next step in our journey is finding items beside wood, like um stone and coal. Mine as much of it as you can. Don't ask me why. Just do it even if it bores you. You might need to trade some of it later. Who knows? Now, let's check the crafting table again. There are some stone equipments we can build. So, let's do that. And what can we build with coal? Well, that's for us to figure out. Yay. Tells me there are new recipes, but doesn't tell me which ones are new beside this quick one-time pulse. Perfect. This is why I demand a sorting option based on newest and oldest, rarity, value, and cost, like how many ingredients you need for it. And now that we have changed basically everything about the recipe book, let's just refresh all of it and get rid of these rounded corners. Blocky game with sharp corners but rounded UI. Yep, adds up. Magic wand, do your thing. Now we can make it show all the recipes that use coal when I hover on it. Wait, what is this? Wouldn't you just tell me the exact number of items I'm crafting? No, this doesn't make four torches. It makes 16. Let's just craft a bunch of torches because we are going cave diving. In your path to find a good cave, be careful not to randomly unleash lava or fall into unforeseeable circumstances, aka holes in the ground. Find a good little cave, dive into it, and start mining whatever you can find. It doesn't matter. Whether it's copper, coal, stone, or iron. You need iron and lots of it. Be sure to leave clues and torches if you want to find your way back easily. If your cave comes to an end, don't panic. Just start digging downwards. We're looking for iron and valuable minerals which are only found very deep into the ground. Make a safe stairway like so and keep on digging. At some point, you'll start finding more valuable stuff in your way down. And it slowly gets really lonely. Hello. Nothing. What time is it anyway? How much longer am I supposed to keep this up? It's okay. Let's just check the debug screen with F3. Oh, hell no. I want something simpler, like in the HUD. We could have a little time bar with the sun rising in the morning, going to the top till night and the moon rising at night and going up till the next day, plus maybe a digital time or XYZ coordinates and the biome you're in. Of course, you should be able to modify which ones you want. Like I just want to see the time bar and biome. Anyway, let's keep digging. And we have found another cave. Let's mine all the iron we can and spend as much time in the caves as possible because I'm not going back down here. And once we're done, let's make our way back up and breathe. I miss this guy. Now, let's check our items. Oh gosh, I kind of wish there was a way to clean out all of it and not have to sort them manually. Plus, there's so much I don't want that I wish I could get rid of. Oh, you know what? It's time for a big change. Imagine the main inventory. You could have a recipe book icon over here, an auto sorting icon here, and the trash icon. So, you could dump anything in it, and it could save the last item you dumped just in case you mistook it. Plus, why not put the offh hand and armor here? So, you don't have to leave the crafting table or whatever functional block you're using, open the inventory, and then place your armor there. Things could be easier. Now, for our crafting table, I think we can really get more creative than this. There are lots of functional blocks, and they all look bland like this. I mean, come on, Mojang. You have created lots of cool custom UI inside Bedrock for different packages based on different games. They look pretty cool and fun. Why does the main game's UI have to look like this? I think we can draw inspiration from the blocks design itself and design a more fun and distinguished version for everything. The crafting table, furnace, chest, enchantment table, ctography table, brewing stand, and so on. For the longest time, I was overthinking the placement of these functional blocks. Well, actually, I'm still overthinking it. If I put it on the right side, the grit is closer to you, and the recipe book could be a lot larger, showing a lot more items and categories, especially for creative mode. But it takes some getting used to and I saw some negative comments here and there about the horizontal layout proposed in an upcoming bedrock update. Still, I asked you guys in my streams and some of you preferred it. The other option was to leave them on the top vertically as before, except I'm moving the recipe book to the right side so when you craft something using the recipe book, the output is closer to you. Plus, this way we could have more options like color filters on the side. And with the categories up here, there's much more space to add a favorites category. and favorite any recipe you want to quickly access it later. I honestly can't decide which one I like more, so you decide and go vote in the poll on my channel. Finally, it would be nice to have both light and dark modes for the whole UI. I think ultimately these could be options in the settings so you have a choice. Speaking of settings, let's pause the game and do a quick tour. We've talked about how soulless Java's buttons are, and the same applies here. Plus, there is no hierarchy. Like, what's the settings button doing down here? Let's give these buttons both hierarchy and style. I like the option of quitting to desktop, so why not add that in there, too? For Bedrock, we have a few more options, but I want to keep it similar. So, let's bring the buttons on this side and friends list on the other, so it's consistent with the rest of the game menus. Logically, the resume button comes down here, too, so it's both closer to your fingers, and a simple back button would trigger it. Now we can fit the dressing room, screen capture, and other buttons next to the others, so they're more accessible. The settings button is on top now in both editions. So, let's go there. Java settings are so dumb in a unique way. Like, ooh, look at me. I'm not like the other settings pages. I'm complicated and full of buttons for no reason at all. And Bedrock is just like the world creation page. Too many categories and a long scroll. I have a proposal. Why not just use tabs like a normal settings page with well-defined categories? And now the settings themselves. Some of the settings options have to be drop downs, like the biome blend having only eight options and then being a full slater. Not even using the snapping points. GUI scale straight up gives you a preview right there and then making you have to grab a magnifier to bring it back to a size where you can see anything at all. I mean, brightness doesn't give you a preview, but this one out of all of them does. So much for caring about access ability. Most of these settings need a preview before applying them. Let's fix the settings and their inputs, giving them some hierarchy readability and proper descriptions and go back to the game. Let's continue our journey. Wait, is that a village? I just love this map. We are going there. And look, there's even a Nether portal. Let's just stop here for a moment and cherish this beautiful scenery with the sunset and the moon and the stars. It's such a pretty [Music] game. Okay, enough. Let's go. What are you looking at? This is a pretty nice village at night, but I'm afraid it's time to wake up and welcome your guest. Well, hello there, rude. All right, what do we have in the chests? I wonder what a million dollar smells like. I'm ready to trade. So, what do we have, villager? Oh, the trading UI needs an overhaul, too. Something simple that follows our new designer style. And I'm trading one emerald for two redstone dusts. A brewing stand. Hell yeah. Now we can make a potion. I kind of wish there was a recipe book for the brewing stand, too, so you could see all the potions you could make, because otherwise it would take lots of trial and error, and one misstep could waste your materials. Plus, there should be a hint that you need a nether wart to create a base for your potions. And for the naming, come on, awkward potion. How about potion base instead? Now, I want to make a potion of swiftness. Since I don't have all the ingredients, let's switch to creative mode where we have more items for the purposes of this demonstration. The UI in creative mode looks the same in my design, so you're already used to everything. And unlike the current one, you get to see your entire inventory. I'm going to grab all the ingredients I need and put them in one by one. And now we have three potions of swiftness. I am speed. Wait, how much longer do I have again? Come on. You're not going to make me open the inventory every time, are you? Want to make the duration even more transparent so I won't see anything at all? Why can't we just have a little indicator on the hut that tells us how long we have till the potion effect runs out? And not like this useless box, you know, seeing the beautiful and distinguished icons of potions reminds me of other item icons like how this is called flint and steel and not stealing flint or how the enchanted books that are used to upgrade your armor have the same exact icon. How is this even possible? I knew I had to use my pixel art skills one way or the other. So, I designed completely new icons that are more distinguished and color-coded like the bane of arthropods, protection, respiration, fire protection, feather falling, efficiency, unbreaking, curse of binding, fortune, power, luck of the sea, and so on. Let's continue our adventure by building a new functional block, a furnace. Now, I can finally use all that iron I mined and craft myself a nice armor made entirely of iron. Outfit check. Now's a good time to introduce a new section to our UI for character info. Here we can have all sorts of information like full written time if you don't want it on your HUD. How many days you've spent in this world, your position in the world, how many XPs you need for the next level, and full armor stats, plus color-coded icons for any enchants that are enabled on your armor. And you could open this section using a simple shortcut like shift E on PC. You know what? This village is so nice. I think I'm going to just settle here. Good thing I already have a lot of stone and wood. So, I'm going to build myself a simple house. Let's clean up this area. Build four pillars and the general foundation. A simple stairway. Obviously going to need walls and roof made of stone. Some barrels for storage. Couple of glasses for windows. And nice little flowers in front of them. And a sign in front of the house to specify my territory. All villagers are welcome in it. I guess the house feels kind of empty. Let's see if I can adopt a pet. Hello, little kitty. Here's a fish for you. A Come on, follow me. Are you coming? It's asleeping in my bed. Here's more fish for you. Now that I'm thinking about it, maybe I can add another tab to the character info section. So, it has a list of all my pets, their names, and their health bar. Now, I have two happy cats. My life is complete. Wait, actually, my friend has to see this. Let me enable land mode so my friend can join. Uh, where are you? Right, left, down. Where? I wish there was something like an icon on the edges of the screen following my friend or name or something or at least a tab on the character info with the list of the players in the game and their coordinates. Any of these options would do. Where were you? Anyway, I'm going to go show my friend around. But in the meantime, putting everything we've talked about together. Well, that's all for this video. If you liked it, make sure you do your magic down below and see you on the next one.