Minecraft’s third Game Drop of 2026 has slipped into testing, and it leans hard into building. The headline addition is the Dappled Forest, an autumn-toned biome packed with poplar trees, red shrubs, and a fresh off-gray wood set. Alongside it come wool stairs and slabs in all sixteen colors, plus a new structure called the abandoned camp. You can play with everything right now without waiting for the full release.
Quick answer: Switch your launcher to Minecraft Bedrock preview 26.40.27 or Minecraft Java snapshot 26.3, then load a world with the Drop 3 experimental features turned on to explore the Dappled Forest, poplar wood, wool stairs and slabs, and abandoned camps.
How to test the Dappled Forest drop right now
The new content sits behind experimental toggles in two separate test channels. Java players use a snapshot, while Bedrock players use a preview build. Pick the one that matches your edition.
Note: These are pre-release builds. Features can change before the final drop ships, so test on a fresh world rather than a long-term survival save.
What’s inside the Dappled Forest biome
The Dappled Forest is the first Minecraft biome built around a true autumn look. It generates close to cold biomes and fills its canopy with poplar trees that show off seasonal color. Fallen poplar trees lie across the ground, and red shrubs grow in small patches throughout.
Poplar logs craft into a full wood set in a warm gray tone, giving builders a neutral structural wood that reads cleaner than the bone-white of pale oak. The leaves come in three colors, and each tree picks one at random. Saplings keep that randomness, so a planted sapling can grow into any of the three variants. You can also buy poplar saplings from the Wandering Trader.
| Feature | Details |
|---|---|
| Poplar leaf colors | Red, orange, or yellow (random per tree) |
| Poplar saplings | Drop from leaves; grow into a random variant; sold by Wandering Trader |
| Falling leaf particles | Match the color of each tree’s leaves |
| Red Shrub | Decorative plant; usable in a Composter; spreads with Bone Meal to an adjacent space |
| Shelf Mushroom | Grows on living and fallen poplar trees; small grows to large with Bone Meal; usable in stews |
Shelf mushrooms add a small twist. They come in small and large sizes, and a large one drops two mushroom items when broken. They also have a slight bounce when you step on them, similar to a bed, which softens fall damage if you land on one. Red shrubs keep their color anywhere you replant them.
The biome’s wildlife is the standard passive lineup, using cold-weather variants where they exist.
- Sheep
- Chicken
- Cow
- Pig
- Rabbit
- Fox
Wool stairs and slabs arrive in all 16 colors
Wool has been a solid cube since 2009, and this drop finally cuts it into stairs and slabs. Both shapes are available across the full color range, so you get sixteen new stair blocks and sixteen new slab blocks to craft.
For builders that opens up sloped roofs, furniture geometry, soft color gradients, and interior detailing without the armor-stand and block-scaling tricks people leaned on before. Because wool already spans sixteen colors, it instantly becomes one of the most flexible decorative materials in the game.
| New wool stair and slab colors |
|---|
| White, Light Gray, Gray, Black |
| Red, Orange, Yellow, Lime |
| Green, Cyan, Light Blue, Blue |
| Purple, Magenta, Pink, Brown |
Abandoned camps and their loot
The new wool stairs and slabs aren’t just decoration. They build the abandoned camp, a small structure that spawns across a wide range of biomes, each with its own design variant.
Each camp holds chests and barrels stocked with loot, so they’re worth scouting out. Some pieces of the structure stay generic across every biome, while others change to match the region. Abandoned camps can appear in many places, including the Dappled Forest itself.
- Meadow, Cherry Grove, Forest, Birch Forest, Old Growth Birch Forest
- Flower Forest, Windswept Forest, Dappled Forest
- Taiga, Snowy Taiga, Old Growth Spruce Taiga, Old Growth Pine Taiga
- Sparse Jungle, Bamboo Jungle, Swamp, Savanna
- Wooded Badlands, Pale Garden
How to confirm the new features loaded
You know the build is working when poplar trees with colored leaves, red shrubs, and shelf mushrooms generate in the Dappled Forest, and when wool stairs and slabs appear in your crafting recipes and Creative inventory. If those are missing, the most common reason is that the Drop 3 experimental features were never enabled when the world was created, since they cannot be turned on for an existing world afterward. Make a new world with the toggle active and the content will generate.
This drop still doesn’t have an official name, and Mojang hasn’t confirmed a final release date for it yet. What is locked in is that the whole package is testable today across Java and Bedrock, and it’s shaping up as one of the most build-focused additions Minecraft has had in a while.
