Highlights
- Botania is a mod that adds mystical flowers and plants with special abilities, as well as a powerful end boss to challenge.
- Thaumcraft 6 focuses on drawing magic from physical objects and delving into alchemical research, with new biomes, bosses, and a neutral mob to encounter.
- Apotheosis enhances enchanting in Minecraft, allowing for new enchantment values and beautifully designed bookshelves, resulting in more powerful tools and items.
Minecraft has its fair share of wonder and magic in the vanilla game, with potion brewing, Elytra, and enchanting items. If you're looking for more mysticism in your games, plenty of mods are available to add that witchy flair.
Some mods in this list use new natural items that you'll need to accumulate to harness the powers of nature, whereas others focus more on rituals performed at the right place and time. Then again, why not install all of them and try your hand at becoming the most powerful magical being in the universe? Just don't forget to feed your familiar occasionally.
Updated August 28th, 2023, by Rosa Baumgartl: The Minecraft world is already pretty magical, with a dragon, teleportation, magical potions, and frogs spitting out lamps. But there's no such thing as too much magic, so we've added a few more mods to this list so that you and your friends can combine the exact magical systems you want to play with.
13 Botania
Unsurprisingly, Botania is a mod centered around botany and what flowers can do for you. Sixteen Mystical flowers are generated throughout the world and act as the raw materials for your magical needs, but functional flowers can be crafted using the Petal Apothecary. Complex recipes for the plants provide useful services for you, such as hurting enemies, powering furnaces, teleporting items, and breeding farm animals.
A mod like this wouldn't be complete without an end boss, Botania's being the Guardian of Gaia, requiring a Beacon and lots of rare items to summon. All of this herbalist magic is powered by mana and explained step by step in the mod's manual, Lexica Botania.
12 Thaumcraft 6
This mod is all about drawing magic in the form of Essentia from physical objects and using it to create miracles; that's how the creators describe it. Thaumaturgy begins with Salis Mundus, a component sprinkled onto vanilla blocks to transform them into their magical variants. The manual, called the Thaumonomicon, holds all the information the player has discovered through researching the physical world.
With two new biomes to explore, six bosses to defeat, and a neutral mob named Pech to trade with, there's plenty of alchemical research to delve into in this mod. Be careful of maintaining stability when using magic, though, as Flux Rifts and Taint can spawn and cause random events to disrupt your world.
11 Apotheosis
The name itself means the highest point achievable, so it's reasonable to install this mod with high expectations. There are six modules that can each work independently, so if something doesn't appeal to you, it's easy to turn off that part of the mod. Apotheosis adds to enchanting with three new values that affect how good the outcome will be, as well as beautifully designed new Bookshelves, each providing different stat combinations.
You can also craft Enchanted Golden Apples and wear your favorite potions as an endless charm. Items crafted come with a quality affix that can be retrieved through a Soul Fire and Rarity Shards to create your ultimate tools. This mod effortlessly builds on vanilla Minecraft and is a great way to simply boost the magic already in the game.
10 Nature's Aura
Nature's Aura's mechanics are a lot more straightforward than some of the other mods in this list, but that doesn't mean the content is lacking. Power, or Aura, is drawn from flowers and trees to create magical items and effects. Plenty of natural elements in an area will passively increase the Aura, leading to fast plant growth in farms. However, depleting Aura on a large scale will cause natural decay, as leaves despawn and animals die.
A lot of the mechanics can be automated, bottling sunshine and ghosts, for instance, and the tools this mod creates are incredibly useful when terraforming large areas. Baubles can be worn to produce different effects such as ground pound damage, seeing Aura, and fuelless smelting.
9 Inventory Pets
But what is a magic user without a cute familiar to follow them around and grant them quirky mini powers? Inventory Pets is an adorable mod that introduces craftable friends that fit in your inventory. Some can be found in procedurally generated, mod-specific structures, so it's worth exploring for the rarer ones.
There are 52 friends to collect, each offering a neat trick, meaning players can mix and match to suit whatever their current mission is. Each pet needs to be on your hotbar and requires its favorite food to function. But with perks like auto-smelting, negative effect removal, lava-walking, and random potion gifts, these little guys are definitely worth the inventory space.
8 Ensorcellation
If you're not looking to learn a bunch of rituals or spend days searching for a special flower, try Ensorcellation. This mod adds enchantments; it's as simple as that. Some can be put on animal armor, keeping our favorite steeds a little safer. Existing enchantments might also be tweaked, such as Sword-specific effects being available on Axes, which can result in serious damage.
Some really unique ones include Air Affinity, removing the debuff to mining when the player isn't standing on a solid block, and Vigilante, which does more damage to Illagers and is great for raids. Soulbound and Insight are both incredibly useful in general, keeping the items in your inventory when you die and increasing experience gained, respectively.
7 Not Enough Potions
No, the title isn't a review of the mod - in fact, the mod is the answer to the complaint. Not Enough Potions adds, well, lots of potions! It makes them feel more magical, too, as you'll need a mortar and pestle and a Mixing Cauldron over a fire to craft stronger potions. Instead of putting an item in a Crafting Table to break it down into dust (like Blaze Powder and Redstone), you must put it in a mortar with a strong enough pestle for the material.
Effects added with this mod include Revival, Diamond Skin, Unluck, and Recoil, to name a few, and you can even watch the bottles change as they brew up in real-time.
6 Runelic
This mod isn't going to transform your entire landscape like some of the others and is more of a quality-of-life mod to add a little pizzazz. Runelic translates words into an archaic and mythical language, which can be directly translated back, as each character is unique to its corresponding letter.
Leave brewing instructions to your fellow wizards and warlocks in multiplayer or spooky warnings to keep would-be burglars out of your lair. Or just dot signposts around for the decorative aspect because Runelic looks so cool. There's even a command to translate all messages in world chat into Runelic, though that might disrupt the flow of the game while people look it up!
5 Blood Magic
If you're looking for a mod to base your entire playthrough on, look no further, as Blood Magic will require a lot of dedication and expensive materials. The ultimate goal of the mod is to become an Archmage using health taken from yourself, willingly or by sacrificing mobs to seal their life force away forever. You'll need a Sentient Sword early on, not to keep you company but to make sure every mob you kill drops its will.
Later in the game, you'll be drawing Divination Sigils on the ground, storing different types of will to enchant your Sentient gear, and building tier-six Blood Altars to transmute the physical world and store its Life Essence. Living Armor is also something you'll want, as it will adapt to your play style to keep you alive, whether you tend to fall off cliffs a lot or jump into the fray alone. This is an expansive mod with many fun world effects to uncover.
4 Astral Sorcery
This is a beautiful mod dedicated to the night sky and its lights. You'll spawn with an in-depth guide that adds new chapters as each step is taken, unlocking perks. You'll get to use an actual wand to link Astral Crystals, throw light long distances, and transmute blocks into more useful materials. Astral Sorcery opens up a world of teleportation through Celestial Gateways, too, which you can use to travel vast distances across the Nether, the End, or the Overworld.
There are a variety of wands to craft as well, each having its own unique effects, such as placing a lot of blocks in customizable ways, flinging the player to the top of mountains, and building floating spheres out of anything you have on hand. This mod makes a lot of use of Marble as well as subtle particle effects, making it an elegant and functional magic mod.
3 Occultism
Occultism is based on the works of Johnathon Stroud, who wrote a series of occult-based fantasy books known as the Bartimaeus series. In this world, magic is performed by demons. There's a handy guide you can craft to help you interact with these demons and persuade them to do your bidding.
You'll use the typical occult setup of purple flames, divination rods, and rune circles to discover magical groves hidden in plain sight. As well as commanding demons to mine for you in other dimensions, you can use them as fighting familiars or to automate all the book crafting you'll need. New enchantments and powerful armor are also available in this mod; eventually, you can even open your third eye.
2 Ice And Fire: Dragons
Have you ever wanted to jump on the Ender Dragon's back and go for a ride? What about blasting the landscape with her breath weapon, watching your prey flee from the noxious fumes? Well, with this mod, you can do one better. Ice And Fire introduces three types of dragon, as well as a huge assortment of mythical creatures to hunt late game. Fire dragons patrol most biomes and ice dragons on icy mountaintops. At night, you can rarely come across storm dragons that shoot lightning.
Deep underground, closer to the earth's core, you can find dragon nests full of treasure and a slumbering tier-five dragon with its egg. Battle the parent, and raise its baby as your very own. Craft amazing weapons and armor from dragon scales, bones, and blood, and conquer the skies.
1 Spirit
This isn't just another familiar-finding mod. Spirit uses soul fire, soul steel, and soul crystals to transform items and mob spawners. Collect souls from unique mobs to fill up mob spawners and relocate them anywhere in your world for convenient slaying. Soul steel tools are a handy upgrade to your basic iron set.
It isn't just items you can transmute and summon, but living beings too. Was your favorite village overrun by Pillagers? Or maybe it's too far from your base to transport villagers from. Set up a circle of pedestals, follow the guide, float specific items on each, and voilà! A whole new, functioning villager for you to love, or scam. This mod is a great, simple addition to any world that needs a little more magic.