X-ray packs: 157 of them, and why they break less than everything else
X-ray is one of the most searched things in Bedrock — and one of the most misunderstood. It is not a mod. Understanding what it actually is explains both why it keeps working through game updates that break everything else, and why taking it onto a server ends badly.
It is a texture pack, and that is the whole story
An X-ray pack does not add a feature. It replaces the textures of common blocks — stone, dirt, gravel, deepslate — with fully transparent ones. Ores keep their normal textures, so what is left visible is the ores, floating in an empty grey nothing.
The game is not doing anything special. It is drawing exactly what it always draws; you have simply told it that stone looks like glass. That single fact is behind everything else on this page.
It also means the effect is entirely local to your device. The server, and anyone else playing on it, sees an ordinary world. Nothing about the terrain has changed — only your view of it.
By the numbers
Our Bedrock catalogue currently holds 157 X-ray packs with 9,455,219 downloads between them. Of the ones whose structure we have opened and identified, 65 are single packs and 74 are multi-pack archives — an X-ray texture set bundled with a wrapper. 128 of the 157 declare a minimum game version.
The number worth stopping on is a different one.
| Reports per 1,000 opens, last 30 days | Rate |
|---|---|
| X-ray packs | 1.99 |
| The catalogue as a whole | 3.15 |
People complain about X-ray packs roughly a third less often than about the average add-on. That is not what you would guess about a category of content with a reputation for being sketchy — and the reason is mechanical, not moral.
Why they survive updates that break real add-ons
Most Bedrock add-ons break for one of two reasons: they run scripts through an API that moves between game versions, or they declare behaviour components that a newer game reads differently. Both are covered in detail elsewhere on this site — the toggle 1,560 add-ons need and why your mod is built for another version.
An X-ray pack does neither. It ships image files and a manifest. There is no logic to break, no API to move, no experiment to enable. A texture that was transparent in 1.16 is still transparent in 1.21, because "transparent" is not a feature the game re-implements every release.
So the category inherits an unusual property: it is close to update-proof. That is the honest explanation for the lower complaint rate — not that these packs are better made, but that they have far less surface to break.
The general rule this points at: the more a pack does, the more an update can take away. Pure resource packs are the most durable thing in the catalogue. Script-driven add-ons are the least.
What still goes wrong with them
The 1.99 is not zero, and the failures cluster in predictable places:
- New blocks are not covered. A pack built before deepslate existed makes stone transparent and leaves deepslate solid, so everything below the transition looks like a wall. The pack is not broken — it is simply older than the block.
- Resource pack order. If another texture pack sits above it in the active list, that pack's stone texture wins and the X-ray does nothing. Move it to the top of Resource Packs.
- Wrong file extension. The usual import trap, and it hits this category as much as any other — see one in six packs ships with the wrong extension.
- Ore-only variants. Some packs hide everything except ores; others only tint ores brighter without removing stone. The screenshots on a listing are frequently from a different pack than the file.
On a server, this is cheating — and it is visible
Worth being blunt about, because a lot of pages on this topic are not.
In your own single-player world, an X-ray pack is a tool. Plenty of people use one to plan a build, find a cave system, or recover a lost base without spending an evening digging. Nobody is affected but you.
On a multiplayer server it is a different thing entirely. You are seeing information the game intends to hide, and the advantage over other players is exactly the point. Server operators treat it as cheating, and it is not hard for them to spot: anti-cheat plugins watch mining paths, and a player who walks a straight line to buried diamonds over and over produces a pattern that does not occur naturally. Many servers ban on the pattern alone, without ever inspecting your device.
There is also a technical reason you cannot hide it forever: some servers ship their own required resource pack, which replaces yours on join. If a server does that, the X-ray simply stops working the moment you connect.
The short version
An X-ray pack is a texture pack that makes stone invisible. Because it contains no logic, it is one of the most update-resistant things you can install — measurably so, at a third fewer complaints than the catalogue average. It works only on your screen, which makes it harmless alone and unambiguously cheating with other people. And when it does fail, it is almost never the pack that is broken: it is pack order, a block the pack is older than, or a filename that lied about what was inside.
If you are installing one for the first time, the mechanics are the same as any other resource pack — how to install Bedrock packs covers it, and addon not showing up covers what to do when the import goes quiet.