Sulfur is a bright yellow crystalline block arriving with the Chaos Cubed game drop, which lands as Java Edition 26.2 and Bedrock Edition 26.30 on June 16, 2026. It spawns deep underground in a new cave biome and breaks down into a full family of building blocks, so getting a stack of it is the first step toward both decorating and interacting with the new sulfur cube mob.
Where sulfur generates in Minecraft
Sulfur forms throughout the sulfur caves, a cave biome filled with yellow sulfur, red cinnabar, and sulfur spikes hanging as stalactites and stalagmites. These caves sit deep in the deepslate layer, so you are looking well below sea level rather than near the surface.
There are two reliable ways to reach the deposits. The first is from the surface. Sulfur springs generate on top of the Overworld as a visible marker for a cave below, built from sulfur, sulfur spikes, and magma blocks. Digging straight down from a spring leads you toward the biome. The second is exploring existing cave openings until you find the telltale yellow-and-red coloring. Greenish water and clouds of noxious gas in sulfur pools are another strong sign you are close.
If cheats are enabled and you would rather skip the search, the /locate command returns the coordinates of the nearest sulfur cave, and /tp teleports you to them. Note that you will not always strike a full biome on the first try; a small sulfur pool is common, and spotting red cinnabar nearby usually means a larger cave is within reach.
How to mine sulfur blocks
Sulfur only drops when you break it with a pickaxe. Any tier works, from wooden up to netherite, and breaking it with your hand or any non-pickaxe tool yields nothing. The Fortune enchantment has no effect on how much you collect, so a single block is always a single block.
Because the block has a hardness of 1.5, the pickaxe tier mainly changes how fast it comes out. The approximate breaking times are below.
| Tool | Breaking time (seconds) |
|---|---|
| No pickaxe (drops nothing) | 7.5 |
| Wooden pickaxe | 1.15 |
| Stone pickaxe | 0.6 |
| Copper pickaxe | 0.45 |
| Iron pickaxe | 0.4 |
| Diamond pickaxe | 0.3 |
| Netherite pickaxe | 0.25 |
| Golden pickaxe | 0.2 |
You know it worked when the block pops out as a collectible item and stacks up to 64 in your inventory. The block itself is not flammable and does not catch fire from lava, so it is safe to carry past the magma blocks scattered around the springs.
Craft sulfur from sulfur spikes
If you would rather not haul whole blocks out of a cave, sulfur spikes are an alternative source. Four sulfur spikes arranged in the crafting grid produce a sulfur block. Spikes generate in clusters throughout the caves, and a wandering trader will also sell two sulfur spikes for a single emerald, giving you a renewable supply without deep mining.
What you can make with sulfur
Once you have a stack, sulfur converts into a complete decorative set on the crafting table and stonecutter. The recipes follow the same patterns as other stone-style block families.
| Result | Input and output |
|---|---|
| Polished Sulfur | 4 sulfur in a square → 4 polished sulfur |
| Sulfur Slab | 3 sulfur in a row → 6 slabs |
| Sulfur Stairs | 6 sulfur in a stair shape → 4 stairs |
| Sulfur Wall | 6 sulfur in the bottom two rows → 6 walls |
| Potent Sulfur | 9 sulfur filling the grid → 1 potent sulfur |
| Chiseled Sulfur | 1 sulfur on a grindstone, choose chiseled sulfur |
The stonecutter handles all of these conversions too, including bricks and their slab, stair, and wall variants, which is usually faster than placing each crafting recipe by hand. Potent sulfur is the one block with an active function. Placed underwater it bubbles and releases a gas cloud, and when set over a magma block it forms a geyser that launches entities upward.
Feeding sulfur to a sulfur cube
Sulfur also doubles as food for the sulfur cube, the passive slime-like mob native to these caves. Handing the cube a sulfur block gives it the Regular, or football, archetype, which makes it behave with medium speed, medium bounce, medium ground friction, and low air drag. In that state it also floats when dropped into water.
That football behavior is the basis for the cube-based minigames players have been building, from goal-post stadiums to fast-travel tricks. Shearing the cube removes the absorbed block and reverts it to normal, so you can swap the sulfur out at any time.
With a pickaxe in hand and a sulfur spring marking the way down, a few minutes of mining is enough to stock up for an entire build set and a cube to play with once Chaos Cubed arrives.