Minecraft 26.3 Wilderness Bound Update: All New Features

The Dappled Forest

The new biome generates near cold biomes and looks like peak autumn: poplar trees in three leaf colors, fallen poplars, patches of coarse dirt, leaf litter, red shrubs and a few spruce trees mixed in. Rabbits, foxes and sheep spawn here, plus chickens, cows and pigs in their cold variants. The biome also has its own variant of the new abandoned camp.

What I saw: in my world, Valley of Mods, a Dappled Forest generated right on the coast, wedged between a cherry grove and a lake. From above, the red, orange and yellow canopies stand out from every other biome around them (see the screenshot at the top).

Poplar trees in three colors

Poplars are the star of the drop. Their leaves come in red, orange and yellow, and each color drops falling-leaf particles in its own shade. Poplar saplings grow into any of the three colors at random, and the Wandering Trader sells them. Poplar also comes with a complete wood set: logs, stripped logs, wood, planks, stairs, slabs, doors, trapdoors, fences, fence gates, buttons, pressure plates, signs, hanging signs, shelves, plus poplar boats and chest boats. Builders get three new canopy colors and a new plank tone in one go.

Shelf mushrooms and red shrubs

Shelf mushrooms grow on standing and fallen poplar trees, in small and large variants. They’re bouncy when you land on them, similar to beds, and make a bouncing sound. Bone meal turns a small one into a large one, and a large one drops two shelf mushrooms. They work in stews, and mushroom stew and suspicious stew now accept any combination of two mushrooms.

Red shrubs are the new ground cover of the Dappled Forest. They keep their red color in every biome and can be composted. Bone meal on a red shrub grows another one next to it.

Cushions, straw beds, new stairs and slabs

• Cushions: craft one from three wool slabs of the same color, in all 16 colors, and right-click to sit down. They go on any flat surface, break when the block below is removed, can’t be pushed by pistons and have no collision, so they can overlap other objects (but not other cushions). When I sat down, the game showed “Press Left Shift to get up”.
• Straw beds: three hay bales make four. A straw bed gets you through one night and then breaks. It doesn’t set your spawn point and doesn’t work in the Nether or the End, so it’s a travel tool, not a home. There’s even a new statistic for how often you’ve slept in one.
• Wool and concrete stairs and slabs in all 16 colors. Wool stairs and slabs dampen vibrations like other wool, and concrete stairs and slabs can also be made in the stonecutter.

Abandoned camps and explorer maps

Abandoned camps are a new structure in 18 biomes, from Meadow and Cherry Grove to Swamp, Savanna, Wooded Badlands and Pale Garden. Each biome has its own design, with some pieces shared by all of them, and you’ll find chests and barrels with loot. The camp in my screenshot is the Dappled Forest version: a white wool tent with chests, which I found with /locate.

Explorer maps got a rework to go with them. Camps can hold maps to other abandoned camps (in eight biomes) and to structures like Ancient Cities, Trial Chambers, Mineshafts, Desert and Jungle Pyramids, Warm Ocean Ruins and Woodland Mansions. Each explorer map is now its own item with its own icon, old explorer maps in your world are converted when it loads, and the player marker always shows which way you’re facing. Explorer maps and buried treasure maps can no longer be zoomed out, neither at a cartography table nor in a crafting table.

Smaller changes worth knowing

• Spruce leaves no longer drop falling-leaf particles.
• Players in spectator mode can now use portals.
• When you hold a shield together with a hoe or shovel, raising the shield wins over tilling and making paths.
• Borderless fullscreen is now the default, key bindings use physical keys instead of your keyboard layout, and the Raw Input mouse setting is gone.
• The debug screen (F3) can have its own GUI scale (F3 + F6) and shows your speed and the display refresh rate.
• Realm owners can create up to five invite codes per Realm, and Realm settings now have render distance and simulation distance sliders.

What I noticed while recording in 26.3

• The graphics preset can override your render distance. In my recording setup, the “Fancy” graphics preset kept the render distance at 16 chunks and the simulation distance at 12, even though my options file asked for more. With the preset set to “Custom”, the game used my values. If your render distance seems stuck, check the preset first.
• Game rule names use snake_case. In 26.3, commands like /gamerule advance_time false or /gamerule spawn_mobs false work, while old names like doDaylightCycle give “Incorrect argument”. Old command block setups and tutorials may need the new names.

Under the hood: what modders and pack makers need to know

This drop has a few technical changes that matter if you play with mods, make packs or run a server:

• New transparency: the old “Improved Transparency” option was replaced with an order-independent transparency algorithm. Mojang expects it to cost more performance than the old option. F3 + X toggles it.
• Faster terrain rendering: terrain is drawn with MultiDrawIndirect on supported hardware.
• SDL3 replaces GLFW for window management, input and platform integration. Expect mods that touch windowing or input to need an update for 26.3.
• Custom shaders from resource packs: the new /posteffect command adds post-processing shaders from resource packs to a player’s screen. Mojang notes that shaders and the command may still change.
• More data-driven content: pottery sherds and potion recipes are now data-driven, and loot-related data types accept references and tags.
• For server owners: white-list is now true by default in server.properties, and some log lines that server tools used to watch for are gone (the Minecraft Server Management Protocol replaces them).
• Pack formats: data packs are now version 121.0, resource packs 97.1. Bump pack.mcmeta before you test.

Mods for 26.3

Mods are caught up. GeckoLib 5.5.7 was out for 26.3 on Forge, NeoForge and Fabric soon after release, and every mod I’ve tested this month ran on Fabric for 26.3: 27 of them are ranked in my 26.3 tier list, the performance mods are measured in my FPS test, and my Fabric guide shows how to install them and fix the usual errors.

What comes next: 26.4

The next drop is already in snapshots, and it’s frosty: ice caves, icicles, the Frostbite, Brittle Ice and jukebox playlists. All of them, snapshot by snapshot, are in my overview Every Minecraft 26.4 snapshot so far, with my tests of Snapshot 3 and Snapshot 4.