Mojang now ships content in quarterly "drops" rather than one massive yearly update, and recently moved to a new year-based version numbering scheme — so if you're used to the old 1.21.x style numbers, here's the state of play.
New Mob: The Sulfur Cube
A slime-like passive mob that can absorb a block a player is holding, disabling its own AI to become a physical, pushable object with that block's physical properties — bouncy, sticky, slippery, or even explosive if fed TNT. Shears remove the absorbed block and reactivate it; small cubes fed a Slime Ball grow back to full size. It's one of the more mechanically novel mobs added in a long time — less a monster, more a programmable prop.
New Biome: Sulfur Caves
An underground biome banded with Sulfur and Cinnabar blocks, home to Sulfur Cubes and cave spiders, dotted with bubbling Sulfur Pools. A surface variant, Sulfur Springs, generates in several sizes above the caves.
New Blocks
Full Sulfur and Cinnabar block families (polished, brick, chiseled, plus stairs/slabs/walls), Potent Sulfur (creates underwater geysers when placed over lava or magma blocks), and Sulfur Spikes — a stalactite-like formation that deals fall damage and can be broken with a thrown trident.
Beyond Content: Two Big Non-Gameplay Features
- Friends List — a genuine social layer: friend requests, presence status, and toast notifications, accessible from both the title screen and pause menu.
- Experimental Vulkan rendering — Mojang's first real step toward replacing OpenGL, offered as an opt-in "Prefer Vulkan (Experimental)" graphics setting with automatic fallback to OpenGL on a crash.
Smaller but Notable Changes
- Ocelots, Piglins, and Hoglins can now spawn on Peaceful difficulty (a long-standing bug fix, not a new feature — but a real behavior change).
- Beds and signs moved from entity-based models to block models, and beds now bounce harder to match Bedrock Edition.
- Separate anti-spam kick thresholds for chat vs. commands in server.properties.
- Over 100 miscellaneous bug fixes, including a notable framerate regression fix.
What's Next
The following drop is already in public snapshot testing, headlined by a new autumn-themed Dappled Forest biome with Poplar trees and an Abandoned Camp structure. See the snapshot roundup for the full preview.