Minecraft Java 26.4 Snapshot 2: Fog Glow-Up, Sky Occluder & F3 Redesign
What Changed
The second snapshot in the 26.4 cycle landed on 29 September 2026 with three headline features and a massive list of bug fixes.
Seamless render-distance fog
When the Improved Transparency video setting is switched on, the sky and clouds that sit behind distant terrain no longer pop out as a hard, obvious edge. Instead, they are smoothly blended into the render-distance fog, making the horizon feel continuous and natural rather than like a painted backdrop glued onto the world.
Celestial occluder for the Overworld
The bottom half of the Overworld skybox now physically hides the sun, moon, and stars when they dip below the horizon line. Before this change, celestial objects could bleed through the ground in certain situations, now they vanish exactly as you would expect them to in the real world. A new environment attribute (minecraft:visual/has_sky_occluder) lets data-pack authors control whether this effect is active per dimension, and two matching shader files handle the smooth fog-coloured border.
Redesigned F3 debug overlay
The classic F3 screen, beloved by technical players and largely feared by everyone else, has been rebuilt from scratch to be cleaner and easier to parse at a glance. If you have ever squinted at a wall of white text trying to find your coordinates, this update is for you.
A mountain of bug fixes
More than 60 bugs were resolved, including some crowd-pleasers:
- Sky-fog bleed underwater at sunrise and sunset is gone (MC-152504, a bug that was over six years old).
- Horses, donkeys, and mules can once again be ridden from water onto land without needing a stepping stone (MC-312066).
- Mushrooms were going wild in swamps, generating in absurd quantities, now back to sensible levels (MC-312046).
- Random game crashes during chunk generation have been addressed (MC-312064).
- Lily pads and frogspawn now correctly count toward player statistics when placed (MC-264274).
- Dozens of text, caption, and localisation inconsistencies were tidied up across menus, tooltips, and closed captions.
Why It Matters
Visual polish like the fog and sky-occluder changes might sound minor, but they dramatically improve the feeling of exploring a big open world, especially on a server where you and your friends are building grand landscapes you actually want to admire. The F3 redesign lowers the barrier for players who want to learn technical skills like finding their seed coordinates or checking performance. And fixing a six-year-old sky-fog bug underwater shows that the Mojang team is actively working through the long tail of known issues, not just chasing new features.
Java and Bedrock
This is a Java Edition snapshot only. Bedrock Edition follows its own release track and has not received these visual or technical changes. If you play on Bedrock (including through a console or mobile device), your experience is unchanged for now. Cross-platform players on SNT kingdoms connect via our Geyser bridge, so Bedrock clients are always on their own version regardless of what Java snapshots are doing.
For Server Owners
Two version numbers have bumped inside this snapshot: the Data Pack version is now 122.1 and the Resource Pack version is now 99.0. If you maintain custom data packs or resource packs for your server, check that they declare the updated version numbers before you ask players to use them on a 26.4 build. The shader rename (screenquad.vsh → screentriangle.vsh) will also break any custom shader pack that references the old filename, worth flagging to your shader-pack creator if you use one.
For Parents
Nothing here changes how the game is played or who your child interacts with, this snapshot is almost entirely about visuals and under-the-hood fixes. The prettier horizon and cleaner debug screen are quality-of-life wins that make the game feel more polished. Because this is still a snapshot (a pre-release test build), it is not recommended for everyday play; snapshots can be unstable. Your child would need to manually switch their Minecraft launcher to the snapshot channel to access it, so there is no accidental update to worry about.
For Players
Ready to try the snapshot? Here is the quick version of what is exciting:
- The horizon looks way smoother, no more ugly fog-edge cutting off the sky.
- The sun and moon actually disappear below the ground now instead of clipping through it.
- The F3 screen got a glow-up, if you are into finding coordinates, checking your FPS, or just looking like a pro, it is much easier to read.
- Horses can get out of water again without you needing to find a block to hop onto, huge relief on exploration rides.
- Swamp mushrooms are no longer absolutely everywhere.
Remember, snapshots are test versions. Back up your world before loading it in a snapshot, because snapshot worlds can sometimes be tricky to open in older versions.
Do SNT Kingdoms Need an Update?
No action needed, and SNT kingdoms cannot run 26.4 clients yet anyway. Our kingdoms run on Paper 1.21.11 backends behind a Velocity proxy, with ViaVersion, ViaBackwards, and ViaRewind handling a wide range of client versions (1.13 through 1.21.11). Mojang's new year-based versioning system (26.x) is a significant structural change, and PaperMC, Velocity, and the Via family of plugins have not yet migrated to support it. That means players using the 26.4 Snapshot 2 client cannot connect to SNT kingdoms at this time, they would need to switch their launcher back to a supported version such as 1.21.11.
The visual improvements in this snapshot (fog blending, sky occluder, F3 redesign) are all client-side, so they would not require any server-side changes even once 26.x support arrives. We are monitoring the Paper, Velocity, and Via ecosystems closely and will post an update the moment 26.x connectivity becomes available for our kingdoms.