Minecraft 26.3 Snapshot 6: biome-specific camps, new world options and faster terrain drawing

Tuesday 28 July 2026 brought the sixth snapshot of Minecraft 26.3. Mojang admitted in the announcement that they had run out of witty intros, so they got straight to the point. Just as well, because there is plenty to write about this time: abandoned camps got variants matched to their biomes, the world options menu was rearranged, and under the hood the way the game sends terrain to the graphics card has changed. Let us see what of this actually concerns people running their own server.

Abandoned camps finally fit their surroundings

The Abandoned Camp has been with us in the 26.3 snapshots for a few weeks now. Until now it looked the same everywhere, no matter whether you ran into it in a forest, in a desert or in the snow. Snapshot 6 changes that and adds a separate camp variant for every biome, plus a few small tweaks to the structures themselves.

The result is easy to picture: a find no longer looks like a piece pasted into the landscape from an entirely different map. For the owner of a survival server that is real value, because exploring freshly generated chunks gets more interesting and players have more reasons to venture further from spawn.

World options in a new layout

The second big change concerns the interface. The World Options button moved up in the pause menu and took the place previously held by sharing a world from your own computer. The screen itself has been split into two tabs.

The General tab

You will find exactly what the previous world options screen offered. Nothing disappeared, only its place in the menu hierarchy changed.

The Multiplayer tab

The second tab comes in handy when you want to let somebody into your single player world for a moment. Mojang gathered three settings there: how visible the world is to others, whether joining players may use commands, and the port number the world is exposed on. An always visible Online button leading to the network options was added too, and an issue where Realms owners could not pick the automatic region preference has been fixed along the way.

It sounds convenient and it genuinely is, but only in one scenario: two or three people, one evening, one session. Anything above that level runs into the same wall it always did. It is worth seeing both worlds side by side:

Terrain drawn with MultiDrawIndirect

The most technical addition in this snapshot sits in the rendering engine. Terrain blocks are now drawn using MultiDrawIndirect on devices that support it. In plain terms: instead of burying the processor under hundreds of separate draw calls, the game packs them into one bigger bundle and hands it to the graphics card in a single go.

Mojang also rewrote the terrain.vsh and terrain.fsh shaders to support multi-draw and reshuffled some of the fields in the Globals and DynamicTransforms blocks so they take up less memory. A new RENDERPEARL_EXPLICIT_DEPTH_INVARIANCE define was added for OIT shaders on hardware that computes depth slightly differently.

Technical changes in the packs

Snapshot 6 bumps the numbers of both formats, so custom add-ons need a review. That is standard for test builds, but it pays to have those numbers written down in one place.

Commands and world data

The gamemode argument is gone from the publish command. You now set the default game mode with the defaultgamemodecommand or the button in the world options, while an individual player’s mode is still changed with gamemode. Entity data gained an invulnerable_time tag that makes a mob untouchable for a given number of ticks. A small thing, but it opens up quite a lot when you build custom bosses or PvE arenas.

Three item components now accept values written directly as a number, without wrapping them in an object: minecraft:cooking_fuel, minecraft:brewing_fuel and minecraft:compostable. Loot tables of the minecraft:block_interact type, meanwhile, now have origin available, meaning the centre of the block the player interacts with.

World generation rebuilt from the inside

The largest batch of technical changes, though, concerns terrain generation. The whole noise format in the worldgen/noise registry has been described anew. The firstOctave field is now called base_octave, amplitudes became amplitude_modifiers, and base_amplitude, octave_count and normalize were added. The list of density functions gained pow, sqrt, log, sign, distance_to_point and slice, while y_clamped_gradient turned into the more flexible gradient, with repeating and mirrored options.

If your server runs a custom world generator or a datapack that meddles with terrain height, this is the section that will give you the most work. end_islands also changed, now named end_outer_islands and no longer computing the density of the main island, and in resource packs the trim_palette_replacements field was replaced by the roomier trim_overrides.

Fixes that will please anyone hosting shared play

The list of fixed bugs is long in this snapshot, but a few entries clearly stand out, because they concern game modes during shared play:

The first three entries tell one story: the game mode could drift apart every time a player left and came back. For adventure maps or events with an enforced mode that was a real plague, because all it took was one disconnect and the player returned with entirely different permissions than the rest of the crew.

Update the server or wait?

The answer here is short and unchanged: a snapshot has no business on production. This is a development build in which the datapack format can shift from week to week, engines like Paper are only catching up, and most plugins have no 26.3 builds at all yet. A world saved on a snapshot can also be impossible to move back to an older version, so a mistake may cost you an entire season.

• Leave your main world on stable 26.2 and do not touch it until 26.3 gets a full release.
• Test snapshots only on a separate instance or a copy of the world, never on a live server.
• If you write your own datapacks, start porting noises and density functions to the new format now, because that is the one thing you cannot leave until the last week.

How to test Snapshot 6 at MineHost

1. 1

   Back up what you already have

   Open the panel and make a backup of the existing world before you change anything. It takes a moment and saves you in the least expected situations.
2. 2

   Set up a test instance next to the main one

   Run the snapshot on a separate server or a copy of the world. Your main game then carries on uninterrupted while you calmly check the new features.
3. 3

   Check datapacks and resource packs

   Bump the headers to formats 113.0 and 94.0 and verify that your own noises, density functions and terrain shaders still behave the way you intended.
4. 4

   Go hunting for the new camps

   Generate fresh terrain in several different biomes and see how the new abandoned camp variants turn out. It is the most enjoyable part of the whole test.
5. 5

   Write your findings down for launch day

   Note which plugins and add-ons need updating. When 26.3 lands as a stable release, you will have a ready list instead of starting from scratch.