Minelands vs Stratum

Minelands is a Minecraft texture pack that gives the game's items a Borderlands-style appearance rather than adding Borderlands weapons or characters. Its look combines hand-drawn shapes, semi-realistic textures, and Minecraft's familiar color palette. Creator Matteo Rizzo draws textures on paper, scans and cleans them, then colors and shades them line by line. The free Lite download has 128x textures and is ad-supported. Minelands Full costs €6 a month for monthly support and lists textures up to 2048x, OptiFine support, block variants, customer support, and updates. Separate monthly-support levels list 256x textures for 6.00 EUR, 512x for 10.00 EUR, and 1024x for 25.00 EUR; these include normal and specular maps, Parallax Occlusion, OptiFine features, monthly updates, lifetime access, and ad-free downloads. The maker describes a labPBR-compliant, PTGI-compatible mapping, while shader support is marked “Coming soon.” BSL shaders are recommended. A linked CurseForge listing identifies Lite as a Java resource pack for Minecraft 1.14.4.

Stratum is a Minecraft resource pack for realistic visuals and shader-supported rendering. It includes physically based rendering materials, parallax occlusion mapping, and normal and specular maps when used with compatible shaders. The pack is designed with Continuum shaders in mind and takes steps to work with other popular shader packs. It supports Minecraft Java Edition only, officially covering versions 1.12.2 through 1.21.11. OptiFine is required for textures to load properly; Iris may work but is not fully verified. A free 128×128 version is described as up to date with paid higher-resolution options. One-time tiers cost $5 as a one-time purchase for 256x, $15, paid once for 256x and 512x, or $25, paid once for resolutions through 2048x, with future updates included. Stratum remains in Early Access, and some textures may be missing. Requirements range from 4 GB VRAM and 8 GB RAM at 128x to more than 48 GB VRAM and 96 GB RAM for 2048x.