Minecraft 26.4 Snapshot 2: Everything New (Full Breakdown)

Minecraft 26.4 Snapshot 2 came out on September 29, 2026. Its three biggest changes are a new render distance fog that fades far-off objects by lowering their opacity, a "sky occluder" that covers the lower sky with fog color, and a redesigned F3 debug screen sorted into categories. It also fixes 53 bugs.

This is a snapshot, which means it's a test version for Java Edition 26.4. Anything in it can change before 26.4 ships, so treat it as a preview.

26.4 Snapshot 2 at a glance

Change	What it does
Render distance fog	Objects at the edge of loaded chunks fade by becoming less opaque, not by turning into a solid color
Sky occluder	Covers the sky box with fog color up to a certain angle, with a smooth border
Overworld sky	The bottom half of the skybox now blocks the sun, moon and stars
"Improved Transparency"	Sky and clouds behind terrain blend into the fog, so the sky-terrain boundary disappears
Debug screen (F3)	Items are sorted into categories and are easier to read
New blocks, items, mobs	None in this snapshot
Bug fixes	53 issues fixed
Data pack format	122.1
Resource pack format	99.0
Minimum Java	Java SE 25

For the bigger picture of what the whole drop is planned to add, see our Minecraft fourth drop 2026 guide.

Render distance fog now fades instead of covering

In 26.3 and earlier, the fog at the edge of your render distance faded objects into one opaque, constant color. Against the sky, those objects stuck out strongly.

In Snapshot 2, objects at the edge of loaded chunks fade by lowering their opacity instead. The change targets that harsh contrast with the sky.

The new sky occluder

The second big visual change is the sky occluder. It covers the sky box with fog color up to a certain angle and uses a smooth border so the cutoff isn't sharp.

It's on by default in the Overworld and off in the Nether and the End. Data pack makers can control it with a new environment attribute called minecraft:visual/has_sky_occluder. It's a simple true or false value and doesn't blend between settings.

Two related sky changes came with it:

• In the Overworld, the bottom half of the skybox now hides the sun, the moon and the stars.
• With the "Improved Transparency" video setting on, the sky background and any clouds behind terrain now blend into the render distance fog. The line between the sky and the land becomes invisible.

Redesigned F3 debug screen

The debug overlay, opened with F3 by default, got a cleanup. Its items are now grouped into categories and laid out so they're easier to read and understand.

If you use F3 a lot, expect a short adjustment the first time you open it.

Smaller technical changes

These mostly matter to data pack, resource pack and shader makers:

• New predicate: below_heightmap checks if a position is below a given heightmap value. You choose the heightmap type to compare against.
• New shaders: sky_occluder.vsh and sky_occluder.fsh draw the new sky occluder.
• Cloud shaders: OIT (Order-Independent Transparency, the "Improved Transparency" setting) support was removed from clouds.fsh. A new blit_clouds.fsh shader with OIT support now draws clouds from an offscreen target.
• Renamed shader: screenquad.vsh is now screentriangle.vsh, since it has really been drawing a single triangle for a while.
• Pack formats: data packs are now version 122.1, and resource packs are now version 99.0.

If you maintain a pack, bump these numbers when you update it for this snapshot.

Bug fixes worth knowing

Snapshot 2 fixes 53 issues. Most are text and capitalization fixes, but a few affect gameplay or visuals:

• MC-311924: Breaking an armor stand or a block-attached entity near a sculk catalyst no longer eats your experience.
• MC-300250: Clouds no longer render behind foggy terrain.
• MC-152504: The sky no longer overlaps the fog underwater, which was most visible at sunrise and sunset.
• MC-300894: The harness layer now scales correctly on baby happy ghasts.
• MC-312035: Attacking something in Creative and then switching to Survival no longer adds 5 ticks of block break delay.
• MC-264274: Placing lily pads and frogspawn now counts toward their "used" statistics.
• MC-236052: Z-fighting around the necks of small armor stands is fixed.
• MC-311977: The caption for riding zombie nautiluses no longer reads "Nautilus bubbles".

It also fixes three bugs that Snapshot 1 introduced:

• MC-312046: Mushrooms were generating in huge numbers in swamps.
• MC-312064: The game could crash at random during chunk generation.
• MC-312066: Donkeys, horses and mules in water couldn't be ridden onto land without a partial block.

The other fixes cover window and input problems, such as the game not minimizing when it loses focus in fullscreen, plus a long list of text strings with missing hyphens, missing articles or wrong capitalization.

What 26.4 Snapshot 2 doesn't add

This snapshot adds no new blocks, items, mobs or music discs. The newest disc in Java is still Bounce from 26.2, and 26.3 added none. You can track it down with our Bounce music disc guide, or see the full list in every Minecraft music disc and where to find it.

If you'd rather hear music than hunt for discs, JukeZone has a nightclub inside a giant jukebox at spawn, where DJ JUKE takes song requests.

The giant jukebox nightclub at spawn, filmed on JukeZone.

The wider 26.4 drop has bigger content planned, including ice caves, icicles, ice crystals, the frostbite zombie variant, ice balls and the Freezing effect. Those come from the drop announcement, not from this snapshot's changelog. Our pillar guide covers them in full.

How to try 26.4 Snapshot 2

Here's what you need to know before you play it:

• Version name: it shows up in the launcher as 26.4-snapshot-2.
• Downloads: both a client and a server build are available.
• Java: it needs Java SE 25 at minimum.
• Your worlds: back up any world before you open it in a test version, or start a fresh world just for testing.

Remember that it's a snapshot. Features in it can still change before the full 26.4 release.

When does 26.4 come out?

The fourth drop of 2026 is planned for the fourth quarter of 2026. It will release as Java Edition 26.4 and Bedrock Edition 26.70. Experimental features for the drop will come to Bedrock first, in Bedrock Edition 26.60.

The drop was announced at Minecraft LIVE in September 2026. Earlier names for it included "Winter Drop 2026", "Holiday Drop 2026" and "Drop 4 of 2026". The announcement gives a quarter, not an exact day. We track each new version on our Minecraft updates tracker.

Fun fact: Snapshot 2 came out on the same day as Minecraft Dungeons II. If you want to talk about the new fog or the F3 redesign with other players, the JukeZone forums are a good place to share screenshots.