Mojang did not ease into the fourth drop of 2026. They dropped a block that punishes you for walking on it. 26.4 Snapshot 4 is out and the star feature is brittle ice: it spawns naturally in ice caves directly above winding ravines, starts cracking the instant a player or most mobs steps on it, then shatters completely after a few seconds.
The only thing immune is the frostbite mob itself. You can still obtain the block with Silk Touch or make your own by letting water flow horizontally into blue ice. Place it wrong in your base and you have built a very expensive trapdoor.
Jukeboxes finally get playlists
The other half of the snapshot is pure quality-of-life joy. Put any chest, trapped chest or copper chest variant directly on top of a jukebox and it treats every music disc inside as a playlist. Discs play in inventory order, skip junk, loop when they reach the end, and automatically eject the finished disc to pull the next one. Eject the current song manually and it skips forward. No more standing there swapping discs by hand.
A few smaller changes landed too. Frosted ice now triggers a vibration when it melts or reforms. Adjacent ice, frosted ice and brittle ice blocks no longer render their hidden inner faces. Zombies, drowned and husks are now completely immune to the freezing effect and take no damage from powder snow.
If you run a Java server or just like testing new content before it hits full release, the snapshot is available in the launcher right now. The official article has the complete list of fixes and the exact block and entity tags added for datapack and mod compatibility.
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