Microsoft has begun testing ray tracing in Minecraft on Xbox 

Minecraft is finally getting ray tracing support on the Xbox Series X|S consoles as Microsoft begins testing the next-gen feature. 

With Microsoft’s Xbox Series X|S consoles having launched in November of 2020, this much-requested feature has been a long time coming for Minecraft fans, as players on PC have been able to enjoy the oddly beautiful ray traced lighting for years. 

Unfortunately, this feature isn’t quite ready for all next-gen console owners to enjoy just yet, as the feature has only just popped up in the latest Minecraft preview build that Xbox insiders can access. 

To make matters worse the freshly released preview build is primarily focused on delivering Xbox Series X|S based performance enhancements, with ray tracing support appearing to merely have snuck its way in through these enhancements, as it is not yet feature complete.

As The Verge’s Tom Warren notes on Twitter, Minecraft’s ray tracing mode still requires the use of recourse packs, which can’t be downloaded or installed on the Xbox version of Minecraft. This means that while you can’t start a ray traced singleplayer Minecraft world in the preview build, you are able to join servers that are hosted on PCs running the required recourse pack. 

Minecraft with raytracing on Xbox? The latest Minecraft Preview is optimized for Xbox Series S / X and has early raytracing support ? pic.twitter.com/cqH0cuGbtS

— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) March 28, 2022

With Microsoft owned Mojang having included a toggle in the options menu to enable or disable ray tracing in the preview build, hopefully, it will not be long before this next-gen feature is property supported on the latest generation of consoles, as Minecraft does look spectacular when it’s enabled.