Motschen's resource pack that gives every leaf block a bushy, rounded fringe using standard block models, with no mod or OptiFine required. It covers vanilla leaves and many modded trees. Texture packs that change leaves need a matching edition.
Better Leaves is Motschen's resource pack for Minecraft: Java Edition that turns every leaf block into a fuller, rounder clump of foliage, so a canopy stops reading as a stack of green cubes. It needs no mod and no OptiFine, and it covers the leaves of more than fifty mods as well as vanilla's own.
Modrinth and CurseForge list the pack as Motschen's Better Leaves, while its files carry the plain name Better Leaves. Search results mix it with other projects:
Motschen does publish one official variant, a Programmer Art edition for players who use Minecraft's original textures. Everything on this page refers to Motschen's pack.
Each leaf block keeps its normal cube and gains two large flat planes set at angles through its middle, reaching well past the block's edges on every side. Those overhanging planes are what soften a tree's outline. They use the same leaf texture as the cube, so they carry the same gaps and speckle rather than a separate "bush" image.
The variety comes from tools vanilla already has. Every leaf type gets four different models, each usable at four rotations, and the game picks one of those sixteen combinations for each block, so neighboring leaves rarely line up the same way. Leaves that vanilla tints by biome, such as oak and jungle, still take that tint, so a swamp oak stays murky and jungle foliage stays bright. Because all of this uses standard block models and blockstate variants, nothing here depends on OptiFine, Continuity or any other mod.
Up to version 8.1, Better Leaves shipped no textures at all. Its models borrowed whatever leaf texture the game already had, so it adapted to almost any texture pack automatically, at a rendering cost. Version 9.0 reversed that to cut rendering overhead. Motschen now generates a round texture for every leaf in advance, with the original texture in its center and the bushy fringe around it, and replaces the standard leaf texture with it. His README gives the reasoning: the models need far fewer elements, and one texture per leaf avoids the overhead of two per block in the texture atlas.
The trade-off is stated just as plainly: this version does not support texture packs with their own leaf textures. The block faces sample only the middle of that round texture, so if a pack further up the list replaces it with an ordinary square leaf texture, you can expect leaves that look magnified on the block faces and fringes that no longer match.
There are three workable routes.
Leaves were already one of the costlier things to draw, because vanilla does not hide the faces that neighboring leaf blocks share inside a tree. Better Leaves adds two planes per block with no culling of their own, so they are drawn even in leaf blocks buried deep inside a canopy, where nobody will ever see them. That is where the pack's performance cost comes from, and it grows with the number of leaf blocks in view, which makes dense forests such as jungles the heaviest case.
Motschen's answer is his own mod, Cull Leaves, a recreation of OptiFine's Smart Leaves that skips leaf faces nobody can see. He strongly recommends it alongside Sodium or Embeddium, and newer versions of the mod handle this pack specifically: Better Leaves ships a small Cull Leaves settings file that forces culling on and hides inner leaves, and Motschen has confirmed that newer Cull Leaves releases cull the crossing planes inside trees too. Cull Leaves is released for Fabric, Quilt and NeoForge, and for Forge on older versions, so check that it exists for your Minecraft version before planning around it.
Mod support is explicit rather than automatic. The pack lists more than fifty mods, including Biomes O' Plenty, Oh The Biomes We've Gone, Regions Unexplored, The Twilight Forest, Quark, Cobblemon and The Aether, plus a set of Dynamic Trees add-ons. Leaves from a mod that is not on the list simply keep that mod's normal look. New support arrives through requests on the GitHub tracker, which holds a long queue of them.
The pack works under shaders, with one documented conflict. Foliage can look noticeably darker under Complementary Shaders. EminGT, Complementary's author, told Motschen the fix is the Very High or Ultra profile, or Real-Time Shadows at High or above in Performance Settings, and Motschen noted the problem is specific to Complementary.
One visual gap remains open on the tracker: where snow layers cover the ground, the fringe of a leaf block pokes up through them with no snow on it, which can look odd in snowy biomes.
Better Leaves is a plain resource pack. It installs through the Resource Packs screen, works in vanilla Minecraft: Java Edition, and needs no mod loader.
All three main-pack files are in the Better Leaves Downloads section on this page. Click Download on the one for your version: the current release opens on CurseForge, and Modrinth carries the same file.
Better Leaves supplies both the leaf models and the round textures they are shaped for, so both need to win. Put it above any texture pack whose leaves you are happy to replace with its vanilla-style bushy ones. Placed below a pack with its own leaf textures, the models end up with the wrong texture shape. If you want that pack's leaves, use a matching edition rather than looking for an order that works.
On Fabric, Quilt or NeoForge with Sodium, add Cull Leaves built for your exact Minecraft version. It should need no configuring, because Better Leaves carries its own Cull Leaves settings file. It is worth checking the mod's version list first, because it does not always reach a new Minecraft release as quickly as the pack.
Look at the edge of any oak tree. The leaves should break the cube outline with a ragged fringe. Cube-shaped leaves mean the pack is not active, or a pack above it is replacing leaf models. If the pack does not appear in the list at all, see texture packs not working. General setup is covered in installing texture packs.
No. Motschen's Better Leaves is a resource pack built from standard block models, so it works in vanilla Minecraft: Java Edition without OptiFine or a mod loader. Its companion mod, Cull Leaves, is optional and only improves performance.
No. They are separate resource packs by different authors that happen to share a name. Motschen's is the larger and more actively updated of the two, with official support for leaves from more than fifty mods. A Fabric mod called Better Leaves also exists, but it changes movement through forests rather than how leaves look.
Not with packs that change leaf textures, since version 9.0 ships its own pre-generated round textures. Use an edition made for that pack, build one with the script in Motschen's GitHub repository, or use version 8.1 on the Minecraft versions it covers. Packs that leave leaves alone are unaffected.
Above the packs whose leaves it should replace, so its models and textures both apply. A pack placed above it that changes leaf textures or leaf models will override it.
It adds geometry to every leaf block, and the extra planes have no culling of their own, so dense forests cost more to draw. Motschen recommends his Cull Leaves mod alongside Sodium or Embeddium, which hides leaf faces and inner planes that cannot be seen. No official benchmark is published.
Yes. Under Complementary Shaders foliage can look darker. Complementary's author recommends the Very High or Ultra profile, or Real-Time Shadows set to High or above in Performance Settings.
Only mods on the pack's support list get bushy leaves, and others keep their normal look. Support is added on request through the GitHub tracker, and the build script in the same repository can generate textures from a mod's jar file.
The 9.x releases cover 1.20 through 26.3, version 7.2 covers 1.19.4, and version 7.1 goes back to 1.13. It is a Java Edition pack. Bedrock packs with similar names are unrelated projects.
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