On iPadOS, setting Graphics Mode to Fancy or Simple makes every newer (Ore UI) screen render invisible while remaining fully interactive. Vibrant Visuals renders correctly. The world, the main-menu panorama and the older JSON-UI screens all render normally throughout, so only the UI compositing path under the legacy forward renderer is affected.
STEPS TO REPRODUCE
1. On iPadOS, open Settings > Video
2. Set Graphics Mode to Fancy (or Simple)
3. Return to the main menu
EXPECTED RESULT
The UI renders under all graphics modes.
ACTUAL RESULT
The main menu, Play and Settings render nothing except the animated panorama. The screens are still present and hit-testable: tapping where a button should be activates it, and tapping the back position returns to the previous screen. The player character does not render in the Dressing Room, while the Featured Items thumbnails on that same screen (also character renders) display correctly. The startup progress bar is absent, so the game appears to hang on a black screen after the Mojang splash. There is no crash and NonAssertErrorLog stays at zero bytes.
KEY DIAGNOSTIC DETAIL
The UI is not missing, it is composited at zero opacity. Screen-recording the transition from the Dressing Room to the main menu and stepping through frames shows the main menu rendering CORRECTLY mid-transition (logo, splash text, Play, Settings, Marketplace and the version string all visible), then fading to nothing once the transition completes. Older JSON-UI screens render pixel-perfect at the same moment the newer Ore UI screens render nothing, which rules out a texture atlas fault, a resource pack, and missing or corrupt files.
WHY IT IS HARD TO RECOVER FROM
The setting can only be changed from the screen it makes invisible, so the game cannot be fixed from inside the game. Reinstalling does NOT fix it, because the value persists in options.txt, which an app update or reinstall does not replace. That makes it look like a corrupt installation or corrupt world data rather than a setting. The only recovery is to edit games/com.mojang/minecraftpe/options.txt with the game fully closed and set graphics_mode:2.
NOTES
Both legacy modes fail: graphics_mode 1 (Fancy) and graphics_mode 0 (Simple). graphics_mode 2 (Vibrant Visuals) works. Reproduced deliberately after recovery by re-selecting Fancy in the in-game UI, on an unmodified install with no global resource packs applied. Likely affects mainly installs predating Vibrant Visuals that had Fancy explicitly selected, since a fresh install defaults to Vibrant Visuals and is unaffected.
POSSIBLY RELATED
MCPE-242706 (skin disappears when you turn off vibrant visuals, 26.50, Android) reports the same trigger with a milder symptom, and may share the root cause. MCPE-109870 (Title screen showing no options, 1.16.200) describes invisible but clickable menu buttons that reinstalling did not fix; the cause was never identified there, and a graphics setting persisted in options.txt would explain why reinstalling failed to help.
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