Last updated: 5 November 2026

Minecraft Wilderness Bound Update Every New Feature

Wilderness Bound is Minecraft's third 2026 game drop: it released on September 15, 2026 as Java Edition 26.3 and Bedrock Edition 26.50 (console update 3.48), and its centrepiece is the Dappled Forest, an autumn-coloured biome of poplar trees. It also adds Abandoned Camps you can stumble on across the Overworld, single-use straw beds, sittable cushions, wool and concrete stairs and slabs, and a rework of explorer maps. Here is what each piece does.

01Dappled Forest and Poplar Trees

The Dappled Forest is an autumn-themed forest biome found near cold biomes. Its signature tree is the poplar, whose leaves come in three colours: orange, red and yellow. The colour is decided randomly at world generation.

Besides poplars, the biome contains coarse dirt patches, red shrubs, leaf litter, brown mushrooms, shelf mushrooms and a few spruce trees. Fallen poplar trees generate more often here than fallen trees do elsewhere. Rabbits, foxes and the cold variants of farm animals spawn in it.

Poplar is a full wood set: sapling, leaves, log, stripped log, wood, stripped wood, planks, stairs, slab, sign, hanging sign, button, pressure plate, door, fence, fence gate, trapdoor and shelf, plus the poplar boat and poplar boat with chest.

02Shelf Mushrooms and Red Shrubs

Shelf mushrooms grow on poplar trees and fallen poplars in small and large sizes. Bone meal grows a small one into a large one, and breaking a large one drops two. They can only be placed on the full side of a block, entities bounce when they land on them, and they can go into mushroom stew, suspicious stew and rabbit stew.

The red shrub is a bush found in dappled forests. Unlike grass and leaves, it is not recoloured by biome tint.

03Abandoned Camps

Abandoned Camps are a new surface structure in the Overworld. They generate in these biomes: 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 and Pale Garden.

The camp is built around a tent of mostly white wool stairs, with straw beds inside and fences that match the local biome. Some camps add a stone shelter, a pond, a crop farm, a tree, or overgrown leaves and cobwebs.

Loot sits in chests or barrels, and some camps hide an oxidized copper chest. Camp loot includes straw beds and cushions, and the hidden chest can hold structure maps to a buried ancient city, a buried mineshaft, a desert pyramid or a warm ocean ruins. Abandoned camp maps also exist in eight variants that lead to a Bamboo Jungle, Cherry Grove, Birch Forest, Dappled Forest, Flower Forest, Pale Garden, Swamp or Windswept Forest.

04Straw Beds and Cushions

A straw bed is crafted from hay bales: 3 hay bales make 4 straw beds, and they stack to 16. They are single use. A straw bed is destroyed after you sleep in it, even if you get out during the night, and it does not change your spawn point. In the Nether and the End it breaks without exploding.

Cushions come in 16 colours and are crafted from 3 wool slabs of the matching colour. A cushion is a non-solid entity you can sit on. It breaks if a piston moves it or the block supporting it is removed.

05Wool and Concrete Stairs and Slabs

Every one of the 16 wool colours and 16 concrete colours now has a stair and a slab. Wool versions are crafted from wool; concrete versions are crafted from concrete or cut from it in a stonecutter. Wool slabs matter beyond building because they are the ingredient for cushions.

06Explorer Map and Other Changes

• Explorer maps are now unique items with their own textures, and several were renamed (buried treasure map, jungle pyramid map, ocean monument map, swamp hut map, buried trial chambers map, woodland mansion map).
• The player icon on locator and explorer maps always shows the direction you are facing.
• Explorer maps can no longer be zoomed out with a cartography table.
• The hay bale texture changed: its strap moved down one pixel to line up with the straw bed.
• Spruce leaves no longer produce falling leaf particles in Java Edition.

Bedrock 26.52 (September 25, 2026) fixed cushions disappearing when a world was reloaded, plus an iOS crash after updating to 26.50 or 26.51, so update past 26.50 on Bedrock if you can.