With the newer versions of minecraft coming out faster than i can get my toes comfortable in each version, I thought I'd share my thoughts on playing.

Minecraft is a game that can be played multiple ways. The most popular way is "survival" -there is a threat of dying, but not losing your entire world. It is possible to lose all of your gear, and possibly get lost, but the world remains stable and your builds will always be around somewhere. Most people keep "cheats" off- so they don't have the luxury of using commands to spawn things in and be lazy. This play style retains the challenge of having to build things yourself without infinite inventory, so you have to gather things all on your own.

This is the most popular game style for a reason. Its easier to have drive to play with these challenges, though not so hard that you lose all progress from one mistake like hardcore. It still has resources to manage and find unlike creative.

With these ideas in mind, here are some mods that change the game minimally, adding just a little bit of comfort and ease, or optimization, to the base game. Most of these are almost unnoticeable from vanilla- which is honestly the goal here.

Keybinds
Im personally probably the only one who does this, but i always switch shift and control. I can't stand holding control to run, and shift nvr made sense to go slowly since in almost every other WASD game its the reverse.

I also switch the toss item to Y so i don't accidentally yeet my prized silk pickax in lava... not that anyone else... ever has done this.... more than once...

Accessibility
I love the the accessibility options! First i turn auto jump OFF. My favorite option is setting sneak and jump to "toggle". I have a bit of carpel tunnel and this literally makes the difference. You will need a heads up though, as this is a learning curve in water and it is quite easy to drown yourself with sneak being on toggle in water. it will feel like you have a weight on your legs and cannot get up.

Another great option is "subtitles." I have actually had issues with too much sound and used to play this game with almost muted sound. thankfully my anxiety has dropped lot since then, but the habit remains now of enjoying the visual queue to where sounds are located. You may not need this if you play in a quite room with nice gaming headphones, but without surround sound this option really helps pinpoint sound locations.

Launcher
First a warning: be extremely careful when using a non-vanilla launcher as there have been several points in the past where thousands of players accounts were stolen using pirated launchers or hacked launchers. Do not use one that you do not trust. That being said, I use linux and the vanilla did not work on linux until recently. I would like to say that's why I don't use the vanilla launcher, but honestly I use an alternative primarily because it allows me to store "instances" keeping all my versions of the game separate, with resource packs and shaders and mods already set up for each version and set of save games. It allows me to keep my creative content that I'm working on separate from my skyblock world, as well as separate from a version of the game I have ready for my daughter.
-MultiMC is the launcher I use, allowing for easily seperating the game into "instances" or seperate folders that independantly play the game. You still need to log into your microsoft account and this is NOT a pirated version of the game. On linux its a challange to set up because you *also* need to download java yourself, but doable. Note that for older versions of minecraft you will need an older version of java. The current version for minecraft 1.19 I believe is Java 18. for version 1.16.5 I use java 16, and all the versions before that run on java8. I believe there was a huge security flaw in java versions before java17, so be aware that it might be very unsave to go online with a tech savvy user in a version of minecraft older than the current version.
But, because I use MultiMC I can also share my entire settup, including shaders, resource packs, and mods all included for you. You simply import this zip file into the launcher and its ready to go. You will still need to manually add datapacks, because those are put in the individual world save folder. But these instances have the datapacks I use included in the saves folder. The older versions took me a lot of time setting up to work so that they would function. Due to size I used 7zip to compress. Enjoy :)
-Vanilla 1.19.2 (current most updated and stable for mods version)
-Vanilla 1.18.1 (I will probably stubornly make content on this version for years)
-Vanilla 1.16.5 (my favorite survival world)

Shaders
Version 1.18 did an enormous amount of optimization, honestly using a lot that Optifine had already fixed. This is great, but because I have played on versions as old as 1.12, I still have the habit to of using this to optimize the game. It ads a zoom feature as well (default keybind is C but i always switch it to Z). Its also one of the easiest ways to add shaders to the game. The immersion experience that shadows ad is huge in my oppinion, and most low end computers can handle lite or simple shaders.
-silders lite (low end)
-Complementary Shaders
-SEUS shaders (he was the first to bring RTX ray tracing shaders to java).


Resource Packs
These add flavor to the world. I love playing with these and one of the best ways to change the world is to try a new one out. I currently have a resource pack i use for each world and the world just doesn't feel the same or right without it. I haven't had the chance to look up any new ones for the 1.19 version, but all the these are available for 1.19:
-Chroma Hills (has a smooth feel)
-Winthor Hills Medieval (love the shulkers)
-Dokucraft dark (great for dwarven builds)
-Patrix
-faithful (hd "vanilla" pack)

If you want to stay truly vanilla there are still a few cosmetic perks you can add from Vanillatweaks. My favorites here are the lower sides terrain options they have for grass and ect. They also have a bunch of "quieter" resources to help lessen the noise of specific mobs or mute cave sounds.

Datapacks
here is where you start deviating from vanilla. Ive had a history of anxiety that almost made me quit playing video games, including minecraft. anything that had stressful sounds or jump scares were just too stressful for me. If you don't struggle with anxiety, God bless you and I hope you never do. The most useful packs i found are all from Vanillatweaks. Mostly I disabled griefing from mobs because my favorite thing to do was build and I hated anytime a creeper blew a hole in my yard, or ghasts blew up my nether work.

To make vanilla a bit less tedious and unneedfuly agravating, Vanillatweaks also has some custom crafting recipes allowing you to craft things that are needlessly wasteful. Many would consider this cheating, but to each their own. My favorites here are to make the recipe that crafts trapdoors from planks give much more than vanilla (considering how wasteful it is to whittle a whole 1x1 meter block into only 2 trapdoors), or to be able to craft corals from the fins (making corals a renewable resource). There are lots of little recipes like this, including the ability to craft charcoal from coal or vice versa. They are easy to install, just drop them into the "datapacks" folder of your minecraft save. Another one I use is the double shulker shell drop from shulkers. I've done plenty of end raiding, this is simply a time saver making the game less tedious. Play they way you enjoy :)
-datapack
-crafting tweak
^just fyi, these 2 are for the 1.19 version, but the base website has all the versions.

Mods
These are the QoL mods that I use when I'm still trying to play vanilla. This list needs to be used together or they do not function. A major part of why i use fabric is primarily because I do not use the default launcher, and thus need "fabric API" and "optifabric" as these integrate optifine with fabric. Optifine and fabric are optimization mods that allow you to use shaders, have zoom, and generally improve fps. The game will not noticably run different and does not change any mechanics. The main difference is optifine allows you to use shaders. Fabric is also needed for some mods.
-Fabric
-Optifine
-Optifabric
-Fabric API

These next mods do change the game slightly. "MaLiLib" is a library resource for the other mods to work. They are all designed by Masa and I recomend downlowding them from there instead of curse forge (the main minecraft mod catalogu), But I have noticed he doesn't always have every version on his list.
-MaLiLib (link to all Masa's mods)
-MiniHUD This adds a light overlay so you can make sure your builds are lit up. Since you can use F3 to walk over every block instead, this is mostly a time saver. It also has some wonderful shape overlays to map out circles for builds. i do not consider this cheating or breaking the game as all of these are time saving features that can be done without this mod, fitting the "QoL" mod exactly.
-Tweakeroo If you have a hard time using discipline to not cross lines into "cheating" and staunchly don't want to cheat, I don't recommend this mod. There *are* ways to cheat using tweakeroo. The few reasons I use this are a bit into a grey area for most players. I like freeCam. This allows me to press a button to temporarily put me into "spectate" so I can take screenshots of my builds, including my own character, or just look at things from any angle. This also means I need to use restraint to not delve into the depths of mines to look for diamonds or caves. Some online servers can consider freecam cheating so be careful here as well. To debate this argument: most streamers have a 2nd account they call a "camera" account to do this very thing in spectate. And for most ppl, once you have wings you can do most of what freecam does with rockets. So I leave this to your discretion as to whether you have the restraint to use this as an aide.
-Litematica this is another grey area mod. it *can* be used to cheat, and so if you have trouble with restraint you will need to avoid this one as well. It is also a *very complicated* mod, so if you just want simplicity playing vanilla, avoid this one for that reason. Litematica is a builder's aide and since i play minecraft mostly to build this mod is priceless. I recommend looking up some tutorials on youtube, and you will probably need to look them up more than once. This mod has a million options, some of which if accidentally toggled can make it unusable again. It has a ton of places to set keybinds, that you need to set up for yourself to just use it, so I recommend saving your settings file so you don't have to try to set them back up after spending all the time you need just to get his one working. *After* its all set up, and you understand it, it can be used to put overlays of builds anywhere in the world so you can follow them like a blueprint. This allows you to build something in creative, or even download someone elses' build and take the schematic and put it into any world, in survival, and build it piece by piece. It also allows you to easily make copies of what you have already built into a schematic, and flip or rotate them. Since I have mild dyslexia and copying my builds in reverse to complete circles or domes ends up giving me a headache, this is a life saver. Another use I greatly enjoy from this mod is that *after* you have built something awesome online you can take a schematic of it, save it to your computer, and paste that into a creative world for reference/brag rights that you built this in the past. This has been the reason I have been able to keep copies of things I have built in the past, and even on servers that don't let me use any of the overlay abilities this mod has, i still use for this purpose. The reason i mention the need for restraint is litematica *can* be used to find diamonds underground, as well as easily place blocks. For single player the block placement would be fine, but online it can very drastically increase your building speed past a "vanilla" experience. So be sure that the moderator's on a server are fine with this mod being used that way before you do the deed.
-TellMe I honestly forget what this mod does, but its one of Masa's mods that work together with litematica and MiniHUD.

Mapping:
Xaero's Minimap adds an on-screen minimap radar. I enjoy having a point of reference on screen, and I always keep North up.
Xaero's World Map This adds the overview map that can also be exported into an image file. I just enjoy having maps of my worlds so I always add them. It has been years since I played without one, I think around version 1.14. I know some people don't like using one or the other, and both of these mods work independently so you don't need both. Again, if you are fine pushing F3 to see your xyz location, you can easily do the same thing that these mods do by locating your points of reference, as well as using in-game maps to create images and then screenshoting them. These just make it a bit more time saving, though I will still make in-game maps to decorate as well.

The last mod i want to mention is outdated a bit. With 1.17 I believe you can manually set how many people are needed to sleep to finish the night. However, I found this mod before then and i love it primarily because it puts silly things in chat when you sleep. It has a random cycle of "sawing logs" or "cuddling teddy bears" that I find adorable. Its just a little flavor to an otherwise boring chat message.

-OnePlayer Sleep datapack


World Settings
And finally, when actually creating a game, there are a few settings I tweak. Because I enjoy building primarily, and accidents happen, I always keep "cheats" on. Not to use commands to spawn stuff in, but because I wish to remain the 'admin' of my own single player world. keeping the ability to do commands retains the option to fix something if the game glitches, and glitches DO happen.

On this same thought process, I turn firetick off. Primarily because, in the process of building two nether farms i managed to burn my barn in the overworld down TWICE from lightnight strikes. And that was with firetick OFF, my entire town would be burned to the ground with firetick on. I lost vilagers in a sealed building to these strikes in 1.16.5. So if you plan on building near spawn be aware that this part of the overworld is loaded even if you are in the nether or end and you will not know if thunderstorms happen. This is my biggest reason to keep firetick off. If you keep access to "cheats" you can always turn it back on if you wish to watch the world burn later.

another one i keep off, at least for the most part is turning Patrols off. I like the idea of patrols, but imo in vanilla they spawn far too often. I had 5 patrols jump me in the spawn of an hour once. Having grown up in minecraft version 1.12 I find these very irritating in single player. Especially since my 1.16.5 world is only about 100 meters from a illager tower, so I can always walk over there if I want them. Again, with access to "cheats" I can always toggle this back on if needed.

If you use the datapack zip I include, then these are some commands that will be helpful.
"Trigger Spawn" will teleport you back to spawn. If you play on most survival online worlds, this is already set up using Forge. Its just nice to also have in single player. You can even move this (be aware though that 'spawn blocks' have special mechanics, and moving the spawnpoint does not infact move this location too) using the command "/setworldspawn"

"trigger sethome" will set a teleportation point for you home. again, this is often already set up on many online worlds, even in survival play. To teleport you simply put "trigger home" Between this and spawn teleport it allows a little bit of ease in travel aside from the gates.


I know I wrote a ton here, but I hope it helps that I included all the links for these mods, as well as the instances for MultiMC already set up. Enjoy Mincrafters!