Minecraft Update News
Changelogs for 77 Minecraft versions, from 1.0 up to 26.4-snapshot-1. Patch notes per version, with what each update means for a server you run yourself.
Recent Updates
26.4-snapshot-1
The first snapshot toward 26.4, a week after 26.3. It is mostly technical: Vulkan becomes the default graphics API, old worlds get Sulfur Caves under their pre 1.18 chunks, and the connection handshake can carry extra properties for servers and proxies.
26.3
The Wilderness Bound drop and the current release. It adds the Dappled Forest with red, orange and yellow poplars, abandoned camps in eighteen biomes, cushions to sit on, single use straw beds, and stairs and slabs for every colour of wool and concrete.
26.2
The Chaos Cubed drop. Sulfur Caves are a new underground biome with sulfur pools and geysers, sulfur and cinnabar come as full building sets, and the Sulfur Cube swallows a block and then moves like it. Java can now render through Vulkan as an experiment.
26.1.2
The second hotfix for Tiny Takeover, released a week after 26.1.1 for a couple of critical issues in the release. It adds no content and keeps the 26.1 protocol.
26.1.1
A one fix release eight days after 26.1. It fixes chat reporting, which did not work while chat was enabled. Nothing else changed.
26.1
The Tiny Takeover drop and the first release with a year based number. Most baby mobs got new models and sounds, the Golden Dandelion keeps a baby from growing up, name tags became craftable, and the game now requires Java 25.
1.21.11
The Mounts of Mayhem drop, the last release with a 1.x number. It adds the spear, a weapon whose damage depends on how fast you and your target move, the Nautilus you can tame and ride underwater, the Parched skeleton, the Camel Husk and naturally spawning zombie horses.
1.21.10
A hotfix one week after The Copper Age. It fixes piston, wind charge and teleport bugs that 1.21.9 introduced and adds nothing new.
1.21.9
The Copper Age drop. Copper becomes tools, armour, torches, lanterns, chains, bars and a copper chest, and the Copper Golem sorts items from copper chests into ordinary chests. Fixed spawn chunks are gone, and dedicated servers get a management protocol.
1.21.8
A graphics hotfix. It fixes screen freezes and corrupted textures on Intel Gen11 graphics and a crash when a resource pack carries a broken shader on some AMD cards. It adds no content.
1.21.7
A small release two weeks after Chase the Skies. It fixes crashes and graphics problems from 1.21.6 and adds the music disc Lava Chicken and a new three by three painting.
1.21.6
The Chase the Skies drop. A Dried Ghast block hydrated in water grows into a Ghastling and then into the Happy Ghast, a flying mount that carries up to four players in a harness. Multiplayer gets the Locator Bar, which points at other players.
25w19a
A small snapshot late in the Chase the Skies cycle. Projectiles got a hit margin that grows during their flight, fog was tuned for more depth and gets thicker in rain, and the happy ghast scale got a limit.
25w17a
The Locator Bar left the experiments and became part of the game, the Realms configuration screen moved to tabs with a region preference, and a setting arrived to shorten the cloud range.
25w16a
The second snapshot toward Chase the Skies. Leads were reworked so mobs can be leashed to each other or to a boat, a happy ghast can carry a boat or a large mob, and clouds now reach the horizon.
1.21.5
The Spring to Life drop, the first game drop of 2025 and the one that followed The Garden Awakens. Cows, pigs and chickens got warm and cold variants that depend on the biome, sheep colours now follow the biome too, and forests got fallen trees, leaf litter, wildflowers and firefly bushes.
25w10a
The last snapshot before the 1.21.5 pre-releases. It brought the tntExplodes game rule from Bedrock, custom data on every entity, a new main menu panorama and new textures for test blocks.
25w09a
Fallen trees came to Java Edition to match Bedrock, in oak, birch, jungle and spruce, and firefly bushes started to generate in mangrove swamps and, rarely, in badlands.
25w07a
Sheep wool colours started to follow the biome, cartographers and the wandering trader got reworked trades, camels began to spawn in deserts and bundles turned up in village chests.
25w06a
Warm and cold chickens arrived with their own blue and brown eggs, deserts and badlands got short and tall dry grass and cactus flowers, and random ticks began to reach every loaded chunk in simulation distance.
25w04a
A mostly technical snapshot in the Spring to Life cycle. Mojang reverted two movement fixes that hurt parkour and speed bridging, tooltips got more detail, and cat and frog variants became data driven.
25w02a
The first snapshot of 2025 and the start of the Spring to Life cycle. It added warm and cold pigs, wildflowers, leaf litter and falling leaf particles, and made lodestones cheaper to craft.
1.21.4
Added pale garden biome, the Creaking mob (linked to Creaking Heart block), pale oak wood set, eyeblossoms, and resin blocks. Includes new ambient atmosphere.
1.21.4-rc1
Release candidate for The Garden Awakens. Near-final build for testing before the official release.
1.21.4-pre3
Third pre-release with final balance adjustments and polish for The Garden Awakens release.
1.21.4-pre2
Second pre-release for 1.21.4 with Creaking behavior adjustments and pale garden generation fixes.
1.21.4-pre1
First pre-release for The Garden Awakens. Testing pale garden biome, Creaking mob, and new block variants.
1.21.3
Hotfix release addressing critical bugs introduced in 1.21.2, including bundle-related crashes and multiplayer sync issues.
24w46a
A 1.21.4 snapshot with component and item model improvements. Block entities such as chests, signs and banners now also draw their normal block model, resin clumps can sit underwater, rabbits roam again and creakings survive a world reload.
1.21.2
Bundles are finally out of experimental. Added new music, improved accessibility features, and gameplay tweaks.
24w44a
The first snapshot for Minecraft 1.21.4. The winter drop left the experiments, and the pale garden got eyeblossoms that open at night and resin that the creaking heart gives off when its creaking is hit. Resin turns into a whole family of brick blocks.
24w40a
The Pale Garden arrived as the Winter Drop experiment. It is a pale variant of the dark forest with pale oaks, pale moss and hanging moss, and its only mob is the creaking, which freezes while you look at it and can only be stopped by breaking its heart.
24w36a
A 1.21.2 snapshot that let data packs and resource packs define their own equipment. Bundles in the hotbar empty one group of items at a time, squid spawn eggs only give adults, and converted mobs keep their share of health.
24w33a
The first snapshot after 1.21, with around 200 bug fixes and three new experiments. Bundles came back to be finished, minecarts got smoother movement and redstone wire got faster, and item names now show a rarity colour.
1.21.1
Patch release fixing bugs from 1.21 including crashes, exploits, and general stability improvements for Tricky Trials content.
1.21
Added Trial Chambers, the Breeze mob, mace weapon with wind charges, auto-crafter block, new copper and tuff block variants, and paintings.