Updated for Java Edition 26.3 (October 2026).
Wilderness Bound is the third Minecraft game drop of 2026. It came out on September 15, 2026, as Java Edition 26.3 and Bedrock Edition 26.50. It adds the dappled forest biome with its red, orange and yellow poplar trees, abandoned camps in 18 biomes, new explorer maps, cushions, straw beds, and wool and concrete stairs and slabs. This page lists everything new, with links to our full guides.
| Drop name | Wilderness Bound |
|---|---|
| Release date | September 15, 2026 |
| Java Edition | 26.3 |
| Bedrock Edition | 26.50 |
| New biome | Dappled forest |
| New structure | Abandoned camp |
| New blocks and items | Poplar wood set, shelf mushroom, red shrub, cushion, straw bed, wool and concrete stairs and slabs, new explorer maps |
| Previous drop | Chaos Cubed (26.2, June 16, 2026) |
Everything new in Wilderness Bound
| Feature | What it is |
|---|---|
| Dappled forest | A new forest biome near cold biomes, full of poplar trees |
| Poplar trees | Red, orange or yellow leaves, plus fallen poplars; logs craft into a full poplar wood set |
| Shelf mushroom | Grows on poplar trunks, small or large; slightly bouncy and works in stews |
| Red shrub | A decorative plant in small patches in the dappled forest |
| Abandoned camp | A campsite structure with chests and barrels, with a different design in each of 18 biomes |
| Explorer maps | New maps to other camps and to seven more structures; explorer maps are now their own items |
| Cushion | A seat you place on any flat surface and sit on, in 16 colours |
| Straw bed | A one-use bed that skips the night without setting your spawn point |
| Wool and concrete stairs and slabs | Stairs and slabs for every colour of wool and concrete |
The dappled forest and poplar trees
The dappled forest is the drop’s new biome: a forest of poplar trees that generates near cold biomes. Each poplar has red, orange or yellow leaves with matching falling-leaf particles, and fallen poplars lie on the ground between them. A poplar sapling grows into any of the three colours at random. Poplar logs craft into a new wood set, and wandering traders sell poplar saplings.
Shelf mushrooms grow on the trunks of standing and fallen poplars. Bone meal turns a small one into a large one, which drops two when broken, and they bounce you a little when you step on them, like a bed. Red shrubs grow in small patches and spread to a neighbouring block when you use bone meal on them.
Sheep, chickens, cows, pigs, rabbits and foxes spawn in the dappled forest, and the farm animals use their cold variants. It is uncommon: in our sample of 300 Java 26.3 seeds it covered 0.44% of the surface, and 69% of seeds had one within 2,000 blocks of spawn. Our dappled forest guide has seeds with one right at spawn.
Abandoned camps
Abandoned camps are the new structure: small campsites with chests and barrels of loot. They generate in 18 biomes (meadow, cherry grove, forest, birch forest, old growth birch forest, flower forest, windswept forest, dappled forest, taiga, snowy taiga, both old growth taigas, sparse jungle, bamboo jungle, swamp, savanna, wooded badlands and pale garden), and each biome has its own design. They are common: in our sample the nearest camp was a median 416 blocks from spawn, and 95% of seeds had one within 1,000 blocks. Our abandoned camp guide covers the loot and every biome design.
New explorer maps
Camp chests hold new explorer maps. Some lead to other abandoned camps in eight biomes: bamboo jungle, cherry grove, birch forest, dappled forest, flower forest, pale garden, swamp and windswept forest. Others lead to seven structures that had no map before: ancient cities, trial chambers, mineshafts, desert pyramids, jungle pyramids, warm ocean ruins and woodland mansions.
Explorer maps also changed in general. Each one is now its own item with its own icon instead of a renamed filled map, and old maps in existing worlds convert automatically. Several were renamed: the Ocean Monument Explorer Map is now the Ocean Monument Map, and the Trial Chambers Explorer Map is now the Buried Trial Chambers Map. Explorer maps and buried treasure maps can no longer be zoomed out, at a crafting table or a cartography table, though you can still copy them.
Cushions, straw beds and new building blocks
A cushion is a seat. Craft one from 3 wool slabs of the same colour (16 colours), place it on any flat surface and use it to sit down. Cushions have no collision, can’t be pushed by pistons, and break if the block under them is removed.
A straw bed lets you sleep through the night without changing your spawn point, which makes it useful on long trips. It works once and is destroyed after use, and it is destroyed if you try to sleep on it in the Nether or the End. Three hay bales craft 4 straw beds.
Every colour of wool and concrete now has stairs and slabs. Wool stairs and slabs dampen vibrations like other wool blocks, and concrete stairs and slabs can also be made in a stonecutter.
Other changes worth knowing
- Mushroom stew and suspicious stew can be crafted with 2 of any mushroom.
- The player marker on maps now always shows the direction you are facing.
- Endermen riding something now take damage from projectiles, and endermen and shulkers no longer teleport onto bedrock.
- Teleporting with an ender pearl resets your momentum.
- Raising a shield while holding a hoe or shovel now blocks instead of tilling or making a path.
- Spectators can use portals to teleport.
- Realm owners can create up to five invite codes, and players can join a Realm by entering one.
- The “Improved Transparency” video setting now uses a new method that fixes most see-through rendering problems, at a higher performance cost.
- Locating structures and generating new chunks is faster.
What comes next
Wilderness Bound is the third of 2026’s drops, after Tiny Takeover (26.1) and Chaos Cubed (26.2). Mojang has said the next one is the final drop of 2026: ice caves with ice crystals and icicles, a frozen zombie variant called the frostbite, and ice balls. It has been in testing in Bedrock Preview since September 30, 2026, and Java snapshots for it are numbered 26.4. Our Minecraft versions and game drops timeline lists every drop since 1.21.
Sources and how we measured
Everything this page says about the new features comes from the official Java Edition 26.3 and Bedrock Edition 26.50 release notes, and the next drop’s details from Mojang’s testing announcement. The dappled forest and abandoned camp numbers come from our own seed map engine running Java 26.3 world generation on 300 random seeds; the two guides linked above explain the method.
