Minecraft 26.4 Snapshot 3: Ice Caves, a Frozen Zombie, and a Friends List Overhaul

Mojang just dropped 26.4 Snapshot 3, and it's the first real look at the winter game drop that got teased at Minecraft LIVE. If you were hoping for something more than a few new blocks, good news: this one adds a whole new cave biome, a hostile mob that actually changes how you fight it, and a Friends menu that finally doesn't feel like it was built in 2017.

Let's get into what's actually worth paying attention to here.

Ice Caves: a cave biome with actual personality

Minecraft has had cave biomes like Lush Caves and Dripstone Caves for a while now, and Ice Caves slots right into that family. It generates under colder surface biomes and is built mostly from Packed Ice and Calcite, with snow patches scattered around and ore veins embedded in stone pockets just like everywhere else underground.

The detail that'll actually change how you play down there is the icicles. They grow from the ceiling over time, can reach up to five blocks long, and they fall. Getting hit by one hurts, and landing on top of one hurts more. Icicles only grow in dark areas too, so if you're planning to light up an ice cave for safety, know that you'll also be stopping the icicles from forming in the first place. There's a bit of a tradeoff built into the biome's core mechanic, which is a nice touch.

Ice Crystals show up here too, functioning a lot like Amethyst Clusters. They emit light, break if their support block is removed, and generate naturally scattered across cave floors. Nothing revolutionary, but they give the biome a visual identity beyond "blue version of a regular cave."

Frostbite: the first zombie that actually makes you change tactics

The Frostbite is the headline mob of this snapshot, and it's more interesting than most zombie variants Mojang has added over the years. It spawns in cold biomes, throws Ice Balls at range, switches to melee when you close the distance, and its melee hits apply the new Freezing effect. It's also immune to freezing itself and can walk on Powder Snow without sinking or slowing down, which regular zombies can't do.

Mobs that are vulnerable to Freezing have a five times multiplier to the damage taken while affected.

That damage multiplier is the part server owners running PvE or survival worlds should pay attention to. Freezing isn't just a cosmetic slow effect, it's a genuine combat mechanic that pairs with the new Arrows of Freezing (craftable from a Lingering Potion of Freezing and eight arrows) and Potion of Freezing brewed from Ice Balls. If your server has any kind of mob arena or boss fight setup, Freezing just became a tool worth building strategies around, not unlike how Weakness or Poison already get used in redstone-timed farms and PvP kits.

One wrinkle: Zombies and Husks turn into Frostbites when they stand in Powder Snow, and Frostbites turn back into regular Zombies if they're underwater long enough. That's a neat bit of mob ecology, but it also means servers with custom mob farms or spawn-proofing setups near snowy biomes might see some unexpected conversions happening. Worth testing before this lands on a live server.

The Friends list finally gets some attention

This is the less flashy half of the snapshot, but arguably it'll affect more players day to day. Mojang tore out the old Social Interactions screen entirely and replaced it with two separate things: a new Other Players screen for anyone currently in your world, and a Player Options screen that handles friend requests, muting, and reporting in one consolidated menu.

The Friends list itself got a redesign with actual search and sort functionality. You can now sort by who's online or alphabetically, and search works right from the existing text box you'd normally use to send a friend request. It's a small thing, but if you've ever tried scrolling through a long friends list on console to find one specific person, you know why this was overdue.

Muting also got clearer: muting someone now explicitly hides their chat until you restart the game, which sounds minor but resolves a lot of confusion players have had about whether mutes were permanent or session-based. Blocking, meanwhile, now lives specifically under Other Players rather than being scattered across multiple menus.

Bug fixes worth knowing about

Snapshot patch notes are usually packed with tiny text and capitalization fixes that nobody needs to care about, but a few fixes in this batch are genuinely useful:

• The Vulkan rendering backend was capping framerate at 20 fps on some systems (MC-307830), which was a real problem for anyone who switched to Vulkan for performance gains and got the opposite.
• Mushroom islands had basically stopped generating small mushrooms (MC-312198). If you run a server with custom mooshroom farms or decorative mushroom builds, this one actually affected world generation output.
• Custom Superflat presets containing air were crashing the game outright (MC-312213). Anyone running creative or minigame servers with custom flat worlds should double check their presets after updating.
• Pets could get teleported to wrong coordinates when going through nether portals with their owner (MC-303468), which has been a low-key annoying bug for a long time on servers with active nether hubs.

What this means for data pack and resource pack makers

The Data Pack version jumps to 123.0 and Resource Pack to 100.0, so anything using the old version numbers will need updating before this lands in a full release. Mojang also reworked the minecraft:speleothem_cluster feature to support new placement options, and renamed minecraft:large_speleothem to minecraft:large_dripstone. If you've got a data pack touching dripstone or sulfur spike generation, that rename will break references until you update them.

There's also a new minecraft:block_sound_set registry letting pack creators define custom break, step, place, hit, and fall sounds per block without touching individual sound events one at a time. That's a genuinely handy addition for anyone building custom block packs, since it used to require a lot more manual sound mapping to get a block feeling right.

A batch of new pathfinding block tags (#pathfinding/avoid_in_air, #pathfinding/damaging, #pathfinding/sticky, and others) also landed quietly in this snapshot. These look like groundwork for more nuanced mob AI down the line, possibly tied to how Frostbites and future mobs navigate hazardous terrain like icicle fields or powder snow.

Where this leaves the winter drop

Minecraft's recent cadence has been smaller, more frequent drops instead of one giant yearly update, and this snapshot fits that pattern. Ice Caves and Frostbites aren't going to reshape the game the way the Caves and Cliffs update did, but they're a solid, focused addition that gives cold biomes a reason to matter beyond just looking nice.

It's still early days for this drop though. Snapshot 3 means there's likely more coming before this locks in for a full release, and Mojang is actively asking for feedback through their feedback site. If icicle damage feels too punishing or Frostbites end up too easy to cheese, now's the window where that kind of thing actually gets tuned. Server owners testing this on snapshot branches should treat it as exactly that: a test, not a finished feature set.

For now, grab the snapshot, go punch an icicle, and see how fast your new Frostbite friend can ruin your day.