Minecraft Beta & Preview 26.40.30: Cushions, Straw Beds & Abandoned Camps
What Changed
Minecraft Beta & Preview 26.40.30 (released 7 July 2026) is a work-in-progress build available to Bedrock players on Xbox, PlayStation, Windows, iOS, and Android. It sits under the Drop 3 Experimental toggle, meaning you have to opt in to try the spiciest new things. Here's a tour of what's new.
Cushions
- A brand-new decorative item, craft 3 Wool Slabs of the same colour to make a cushion, available in all 16 dye colours.
- Place one on any flat surface and right-click (or tap) to sit down. Perfect for decorating living rooms, patios, or treehouse hideouts.
- Cushions have no collision, so other items can overlap them, but two cushions can't stack on top of each other.
- They break if the block beneath them is removed, so build wisely!
- Known issue: Cushions aren't auto-generating inside Abandoned Camps yet, but you can grab them from the creative inventory.
Straw Bed
- Craft 3 Hay Bales to receive 4 Straw Beds, a generous trade.
- Sleeping on a straw bed skips the night without changing your spawn point, which is a genuinely useful twist on the classic bed mechanic.
- The catch: each straw bed is single-use and crumbles after one sleep.
- They can't be used in the Nether or the End, try it anyway and the bed is destroyed instantly (same fiery logic as always).
Abandoned Camp
- The eerie Abandoned Camp structure now spawns in both the Pale Garden and Flower Forest biomes.
- Straw Beds can now be found inside these camps as loot, tying the two new features together neatly.
- Procedural trees have been added, and incorrect potion names in the loot tables have been corrected.
Dappled Forest & Bug Fixes
- The Dappled Forest biome gets improved fog, updated Poplar leaf colours, new ambient sounds, and a fix for the black-background rendering glitch on Poplar leaves.
- Wool Stairs and Wool Slabs now have the crafting recipes they were always supposed to have.
- Arrows of Harming no longer bounce off mobs, they now land correctly.
- A pre-26.30 Book & Quill crash has been patched, as has a structure loot seed inconsistency.
- Vibrant Visuals receives rendering fixes on certain Android GPUs.
- Several UI and stability improvements round out the update, including a crash fix when spawning multiple Iron Golems and a fix for splitscreen players getting locked out of Game Settings.
Why It Matters
Cushions and straw beds might sound like small additions, but they represent a meaningful shift in how Minecraft handles furniture and sleep mechanics. Decorating with cushions gives builders a new low-profile seating option, while the straw bed opens up survival strategies, you can now rest safely in the wild without risking your hard-earned spawn point. The expanded Abandoned Camp generation also makes exploration feel more rewarding across two very different biomes.
Java and Bedrock
This update is Bedrock-only, it's a Beta/Preview build and has no Java Edition equivalent at this stage. Java players are on a separate snapshot track and won't see these Drop 3 experimental features until Mojang officially syncs the two editions for a full release. If you play on Java, keep an eye on the Java snapshot notes for when these features make the crossover.
For Server Owners
Because this is a Beta/Preview release, no production server software supports it yet. PaperMC, Velocity, Geyser, and the Via family of plugins are all still working through compatibility with Mojang's newer year-based versioning scheme. Running Beta builds on a live server is not recommended, wait for the stable release and the corresponding server-software updates before considering any action.
For Parents
The new features in this update are family-friendly and low-stakes. Cushions are purely decorative, and the straw bed mechanic is a gentle quality-of-life improvement for kids who hate losing their spawn point during nighttime adventures. The only thing to be aware of is that Beta/Preview builds can be less stable than the regular game, if your child's device is on the beta channel, they might encounter occasional glitches. You can opt out of the beta at any time through Google Play on Android or the Xbox Insider Hub on Xbox.
For Players
Here's the fun part, what you can actually do with this update:
- Redecorate everything. Sixteen cushion colours means your base, your bedroom, your jungle café, all of it can get a cosy upgrade.
- Pack straw beds before big expeditions. Heading far from home? Bring a stack of straw beds so you can skip dangerous nights without moving your spawn.
- Hunt down Abandoned Camps. Explore Pale Gardens and Flower Forests to find these new structures and grab the straw beds inside as early free loot.
- Try the Dappled Forest. The updated sounds, fog, and leaf colours make it one of the most atmospheric biomes to explore right now.
Do SNT Kingdoms Need an Update?
No action needed, and none is possible yet. SNT Gaming kingdoms run on Paper 1.21.11 backends with Velocity proxy and Geyser+Floodgate for Bedrock crossplay. Minecraft 26.x clients are not currently supported because PaperMC, Velocity, and the Via stack have not yet migrated to Mojang's year-based versioning system. This means players using the 26.40.30 Beta client cannot connect to SNT kingdoms at this time, but players on any standard 1.13–1.21.11 profile can join as normal.
When the stable version of these features eventually lands and the server ecosystem catches up, we'll update our kingdoms and let you know right here on the blog. Until then, your kingdom is safe, stable, and running perfectly, cushions or not! 🛋️