Packed Ice Bricks Are the Blue Building Set Minecraft Never Had

Mojang shipped Minecraft 26.4 Snapshot 5 today, and builders have been waiting on this one for about a decade without knowing it was coming.

Packed Ice Bricks are not just a new texture. They are the first ice block in the game's history that behaves like a normal building material, and that single change unlocks a colour palette Minecraft has never properly had. There is also a protocol rewrite in here that server owners need to read, but let us start with the part people will actually notice.

Why Packed Ice Bricks Are a Bigger Deal Than They Look

Every ice block before this one has been unusable for general building, and for one of three reasons.

Plain ice melts near light sources, so you cannot light an interior. Packed ice and blue ice do not melt, but they are slippery, so you cannot walk on them, which rules them out for floors, stairs, paths, and roofs. And all of them need Silk Touch to harvest, so gathering enough to build at scale is a chore before you have placed a single block.

Packed Ice Bricks drop all three restrictions at once:

• They do not melt. Light them however you like. Breaking one does not leave water behind either.
• They are not slippery. The bricks and their variants use the default friction value, so players and entities stand on them normally. This is the one that matters most. Ice has never been floorable before.
• No Silk Touch required. They always drop themselves, mineable by hand or with any tool, pickaxe just being fastest. Hardness and blast resistance are both 0.5.

Put those together and you have a pale blue brick family with no survival friction attached to it. That is genuinely new. Minecraft's blue building options have always been thin and always come with a catch: lapis blocks and blue concrete have no stairs or slabs, blue glazed terracotta has a pattern that fights itself when tiled, and prismarine sits in cyan and teal rather than ice blue. Nothing in the game has offered a cold, pale blue brick with a full variant set.

The Full Set, Day One

Four packed ice in a 2x2 gives you packed ice bricks. From there the set is complete immediately: slabs, stairs, walls, and chiseled packed ice, every one of them also cuttable from the base block in the Stonecutter so you are not wasting material on conversions.

That matters more than it sounds. Plenty of blocks arrive as a lone full block and wait several updates for their stairs and slabs, which leaves builders unable to commit to them. Shipping the whole family at once means you can design around these from the moment the drop lands rather than building something you will have to redo later.

The chiseled variant is the detail worth flagging. It carries a snowflake motif, which gives frozen builds a decorative face that does not need a banner or a map on it.

These are currently in development for the Fourth Drop of 2026 and are snapshot only for now.

Ice Ambience and a New Advancement

Ice also got ambient sounds this snapshot. An ice block with at least eight ice blocks around it horizontally, air above and water below, has a chance to emit a creak. Purely atmospheric, but glacier builds and ice cave bases stop feeling quite so dead.

There is a new advancement too. What Goes Around Comes Around asks you to kill a Frostbite using an Ice Ball, which is a tidy bit of design given Frostbites are the mob throwing them at you in the first place.

The Login Rework Server Owners Need to Read

Now the part that is not about building. The changelog states it flatly: encryption and compression must now be applied explicitly by the server, the client must acknowledge the change, and the new settings only take effect after that acknowledgement.

Four packets are involved. minecraft:login_finished and minecraft:login_acknowledged handle the end of the login phase, while minecraft:apply_options and minecraft:options_applied handle the negotiation itself.

Previously these settings switched on implicitly at a point both sides had to agree on by convention. That ambiguity is exactly what caused MC-308621, a race condition in the dedicated server's compression setup, which is fixed in this same snapshot. The rework and the fix are the same story.

In practice, anything that speaks the protocol directly has to be updated before it will connect. Proxies first, so Velocity and BungeeCord and anything built on them, but it also covers server list pingers, custom bots, packet-level anti-cheat, and any plugin touching the login phase. This is not a config change you can work around. It needs new builds from upstream.

The protocol version is now 1073742167 (0x40000157). If you maintain anything that hardcodes a protocol number, that is the value to target.

Java 25 Is Now the Floor

The minimum Java version is Java SE 25. This is the change most likely to catch people out, because it is not really a Minecraft problem, it is a hosting one.

Plenty of managed hosts still default new instances to Java 21, and some budget panels do not expose a newer runtime at all without a support ticket. Check what your panel actually offers before you plan an update window, not during it. If you self-host, confirm the JVM on the box rather than trusting what you installed last year.

This affects plugins too. Anything compiled against an older bytecode target will still run, but anything using APIs removed between releases will not, and a Java version jump is historically when the oldest unmaintained plugins in a stack finally fall over.

Tag Renames That Will Break Data Packs Quietly

Three renames and one split, none of which produce a helpful error. A tag that no longer exists simply matches nothing.

• spawns_strays_without_powder_snow is now spawns_cold_variants_underground, flagged as MC-312386 on the grounds that the old name made no sense.
• #freeze_immune_entity_types is now #immune_to_freezing.
• #ignores_poison_and_regen has been split into #immune_to_poison and #immune_to_regeneration. If you referenced the old combined tag, you now need both.

Three new tags arrive alongside them: #spawns_ice_variants_underground for biomes allowing cold variants to spawn without sky access, plus #immune_to_wither and #immune_to_weakness. The split is a direct consequence of MC-270793, where mobs carrying multiple immunity tags only ever respected one.

Elsewhere in the data pack format, now version 125.0 against resource pack format 100.2 and data version 5125:

• minecraft:consumable now treats sound as optional, defaulting to minecraft:entity.generic.eat.
• minecraft:equippable makes equip_sound and shearing_sound optional too, continuing Snapshot 4's trend of not forcing custom item packs to declare every sound field.
• The interpolated density function is renamed to upscale, with five modes and a cell_size accepting integers from 1 to 64. Custom terrain packs need updating.
• ore and scattered_ore no longer let blocks discarded for air exposure fall through to the next replacement rule, which changes distribution in custom world gen.

Adventure Mode Mobs Can Break Things Now

In Adventure mode, mobs can now break decorated pots, chorus flowers, and speleothems using projectiles, unless the mob_griefing gamerule is set to false.

For most survival servers this is a non-event. For anyone running an Adventure mode build world, a hub, or a map where decorated pots are decoration rather than loot, it is a real one. Adventure mode has historically been the lazy way to make a build mob-proof. That assumption no longer holds, and the fix is now the gamerule rather than the mode. It came in as MC-312693, which treated the old behaviour as the bug.

Bug Fixes Worth Flagging

Thirty fixes total. The ones with practical consequences:

• MC-170550 makes the snowy_shepherds_house_1 village structure generate at all. It never has. Snowy villages have been quietly missing a building this entire time.
• MC-312630 and MC-312631 fix ruined portals not generating in ice caves, and ice caves missing from the #stronghold_biased_to tag. Both change world generation, so they only apply to newly generated chunks.
• MC-312360 stops paintings breaking outside the world border, which matters on any server using the border as a map limit.
• MC-312316 stops Creakings attacking players who have switched to Creative.
• MC-312717 stops mobs spawning on honey blocks.
• MC-25976 finally gives blocks broken by flowing fluids their particles and breaking sounds back, a bug old enough to vote.

Do Not Update Your Client Yet If You Use Vulkan

Two known issues, both Vulkan, both Windows. MC-312444 crashes the game and hard locks it when you resize the window. MC-312375 causes visual distortion when launching windowed on the Vulkan backend.

There is a new experimental video option in the same area called Prefer DXGI Present, Windows only and off by default, which presents the game through DirectX. Mojang says it may improve IME support and variable refresh rate handling and speed up alt-tabbing out of fullscreen. Not all hardware is supported.

Where This Leaves Things

Snapshot 5 is two releases wearing one coat. For builders it is the best thing in the 26.4 cycle so far, and the kind of block that will quietly rewrite what frozen builds look like for years. Non-melting, non-slippery, no Silk Touch, full variant set on day one. There is no catch left to work around.

For anyone operating a server it is a protocol rewrite, a Java version bump, and a set of silent tag breakages, all landing in the same week. Confirm your host can give you Java 25 first, because nothing else matters without it. Then wait for your proxy and packet-level plugins to ship 26.4 builds, since the login change makes that non-negotiable. Then audit your data packs for the renamed tags, because that is the failure that will not announce itself.

Start the creative world now. Stage the server update properly.