Minecraft’s first-person animations have always been better than its third-person ones. You can see yourself eat in first person; in third person the arm barely moves. Not Enough Animations closes that gap, and at 86.7 million downloads it is one of the most installed mods that changes nothing about how the game plays.
Version 1.12.5 brought 26.3 support on 19 September, with a hotfix the next day.
What it adds
Third-person animations for actions that already look correct in first person – eating and drinking, using items, holding things, crawling, climbing. Some are missing from vanilla entirely, others exist and are wrong.
The design brief is worth stating precisely, because it explains why the mod feels invisible: it is not adding new animations, it is bringing third person in line with what first person already shows. Nothing is stylised and nothing is exaggerated.
It was originally built as an expansion for the First-Person Model mod and works entirely standalone, which is how most people run it.
Purely visual, and what that unlocks
Client-side required, server-side unsupported. The mod changes rendering and nothing else, so it works on any server including vanilla ones and there is no fairness question attached to it.
That matters more than it sounds. Most mods that change how a character looks or moves need the server to agree. This one does not, which means you can run it on a server where you have no influence over the mod list.
Every feature can be toggled individually in an in-game config screen, reachable through Mod Menu or the mod list. That is unusually granular and it is the right call for a visual mod – if one animation bothers you, turn off that one.
The 1.12.5 and 1.12.6 releases
1.12.5 on 19 September added 26.3 for both Fabric and NeoForge, plus 26.2 NeoForge. It also resolved issues with the lantern physics maths and fixed spears and tridents being hidden when an offhand crossbow is charged.
1.12.6 the next day was a hotfix for a crash caused by crawling, which is the kind of bug that only surfaces once a lot of people are playing. Two community contributors landed their first changes in these releases.
If you installed on the 19th and have crashed going through a one-block gap, that is the one. Update.
What it is like to actually use
The honest answer is that you notice it for an hour and then you do not, which is the correct outcome for this category. What you notice instead is the absence – going back to a client without it, third-person animations look stiff in a way you had stopped registering before.
It matters most in multiplayer, where you spend time looking at other players rather than at yourself. A server where everyone runs it looks noticeably more alive than one where nobody does, and the reason is not any single animation.
It pairs naturally with Fresh Animations, which does the same job for mobs. One covers players, the other covers everything else, and together they are the cheapest way to make a world feel less rigid.
Performance and compatibility
Negligible cost. It is animation interpolation, not rendering work, and it will not appear in a frame time breakdown next to Sodium or anything else in a performance stack.
Compatibility is generally good because it hooks player model rendering, which few other mods touch. The mods that do – first-person model replacements, other animation mods, some skin layer mods – are where conflicts live, and the per-feature toggles are usually enough to resolve them.
Fabric, NeoForge and Forge are all supported. The Fabric build took roughly twenty-five times the NeoForge downloads on release day, which continues the pattern across the 26.3 ecosystem.
The licence
Custom protective licence, the same one the author uses for Entity Culling. Fine for personal use, needs reading before inclusion in a distributed modpack – the same footnote that applies to Entity Culling.
Verdict
Install it. There is no real argument against a client-side visual mod with no performance cost, per-feature toggles and vanilla server compatibility, and the thing it fixes is a gap that has been in the game for over a decade.
The only case for skipping it is a deliberately minimal client, or a strong preference for vanilla’s stiffness as part of the look. Both are legitimate and neither is common.
What the config screen actually controls
Each animation is a separate toggle, which means the mod can be reduced to whichever parts you want. The groups are roughly: item use, movement, held items, and physics-style effects on things the player is carrying.
The lantern physics mentioned in the 1.12.5 changelog is an example of the last group – a carried lantern swings as the player moves, which is a small touch and the kind of thing that occasionally looks wrong before it looks right. If a specific effect bothers you, turning that one off is a two-click operation rather than a reason to remove the mod.
Animation mods and the fairness question
Worth addressing, because it comes up on PvP servers. Changing how an animation looks can in principle change how readable an action is – if a player’s attack wind-up is more visible, opponents react faster.
In practice this mod runs on the observer’s client and changes what you see of other players, not what they see of you. Everyone running it gets the same information about everyone else, and anyone not running it sees vanilla. That is a symmetric change rather than an advantage, and it is the reason animation mods are almost universally allowed where minimaps and X-ray packs are not.
Servers with strict client-mod allowlists are the exception, and those tend to allow it explicitly once asked.
Images: Friends&Foes (Fabric/Quilt) project gallery.