What exactly is considered "vanilla" Minecraft?

https://lemmy.world/post/3771076

What exactly is considered "vanilla" Minecraft? - Lemmy.world

I see “Vanilla Minecraft” referred to a lot, but it seems to have different definitions here and there. Is it just Minecraft without data packs, resource backs, etc? So, like, “out of the box”? Or is it really something else?

Mostly just Minecraft out of the box. I feel that resource packs and certain performance mods like optifine could be accurately referred to as “vanilla with optifine” or “vanilla with such-and-such pack.” Once you get into datapacks or Forge or Fabric or hacked clients, it’s not vanilla.

Serverside, it’s a little more dodgy. How many server plugins can you have before it’s not vanilla?

On the server side, as soon as you switch to a modified server software (even just bukkit) - it contains modifications to the original game, and as such, I don’t think it can be considered vanilla.