Minecraft: Wilderness Bound releases Tuesday, September 15 — 436 new labels in the release candidate, and the cushion recipe we gave was wrong

The third 2026 drop for Minecraft has a name and a date. It's called Wilderness Bound, and it launches on Tuesday, September 15, 2026. Mojang puts it in one line: "Wilderness Bound sets off in Minecraft on September 15!"

Five days before the deadline, on Thursday, September 10, 2026 at 11:28 UTC — 1:28 PM in Paris, that's our conversion —, the studio released the release candidate for the version, listed as 26.3-rc-1 in Mojang's version manifest. Barring any incident, this build will become the public release. This guide therefore separates what the publisher has announced from what the files in this build show — and along the way corrects two recipes that we ourselves got wrong on Saturday, August 8, 2026.

The name on September 5, the date on the 10th

The official article "Our next drop has a name" shows a publication date of Saturday, September 5, 2026: "Published 9/5/26" under the byline, and a datePublished field set to 2026-09-05T21:59 UTC in its structured data.

Except the release date isn't in the original text. It appears in a box titled "OFFICIAL EXPEDITION NOTICE, SEP 10", and the page description — the one picked up by search engines and aggregators — still announces an expedition leaving "soon", with no date at all. Our reading: Mojang edited its September 5 article on September 10 rather than publishing a second one, without touching the publication date. Attributing the September 15 date to "the September 5 announcement" is therefore inaccurate: the name dates from the 5th, the release date from the 10th, the very day of the release candidate.

Second pitfall, a usual one with Mojang: the /fr-fr/ address for this article resolves correctly, the page declares itself French in its header, and its body is entirely in English, word for word identical to the /en-us/ version. Checked on Friday, September 11, 2026.

The build cadence lands on the same Tuesday

The official version manifest timestamps every build down to the second. The two previous drops follow the same rule.

Two independent sources confirm each other. For those watching for a second release candidate: 26.1 had two more, 26.2 had one more, and the date didn't move in either case. The time itself isn't published anywhere; the last two versions landed at 12:11 PM and 12:03 PM UTC, meaning around 2 PM in Paris. An extrapolation from two data points, not a commitment from the publisher.

436 new labels: the drop's real scope

To measure the drop without relying on a wiki, we compared the English language file for the Java clients of 26.2 and 26.3-rc-1, both downloaded from Mojang: 436 keys that didn't exist in June.

The drop therefore weighs first on building. And it brings no creature: the three added entities are the cushion and the two boats.

The raw material checklist — and two recipes we had given wrong

The recipes below are read from the 26.3-rc-1 client data, not from a wiki.

Mind the level of proof: the recipe is game data, the cost per unit is our own conversion. Translated into shopping terms, one cushion of each color represents 48 slabs, so 24 blocks of wool. Fortunately there is a shortcut the announcement doesn't mention: sixteen shapeless recipes, one per color, accept a dye plus a cushion of any other color and yield the recolored cushion. Bringing along White Cushions and a set of dyes is therefore enough, no need to set up sixteen sheep farms.

On the sleeping side, Mojang writes: "With the new straw beds, you can skip the night without resetting your spawn point – all you need are three hay bales!" What the studio doesn't say, and what the release candidate shows, is that the game keeps a dedicated statistic, "Nights spent in a straw bed," separate from the counter for ordinary beds; and the sound subtitle triggered when leaving the bed is titled "Straw bed destroyed." The bed is consumed upon waking.

Our decoration blocks guide from Saturday, August 8, 2026 wrote: "A single wool slab gives one cushion." That is wrong, and we correct it here. The White Cushion recipe in the release candidate is a shaped recipe: a row of three slots, each filled with a White Wool Slab, for a result of one. Mojang also states it in plain terms: "Find a cushion in an abandoned camp or craft one using 3 wool slabs of the same color." Three slabs, not one.

The same guide announced the wool stairs recipe as "not yet documented." It now is: six blocks of wool of the same color in a staircase pattern give four stairs, just like concrete. It also noted that the English labels for the new maps had not been published: they now have been.

"Polypore" or "poplar mushroom"? The official file says both

The English names come neither from Mojang's website nor from a wiki, but from the language file shipped with the client: version manifest, asset index of 26.3-rc-1, the publisher's resource server — SHA-1 hash starting with b64104de, 619,503 bytes, re-verified after download. The 436 new keys already have their English labels there.

And the file contradicts itself. The block key names the climbable mushroom Polypore. But the sound subtitle for its bounce announces: "Something bounces on a poplar mushroom." Two English names for the same block, in the same file, shipped in the same build. The block name is the one that counts — it's the one you'll read in your inventory — but with subtitles enabled, expect to see the other one pop up too.

Second oddity: the cushion is not a block. There's no block key matching it, but there is an item key per color and a single entity key. In the client, its class is filed with decoration entities, alongside item frames and paintings, and its four subtitles — placed, destroyed, sitting down, standing up — are classified as entity sounds. The Straw Bed, on the other hand, is indeed a block, complete with its loot table. What this difference changes controller-in-hand, Mojang explains nowhere.

What to remember

Wilderness Bound releases on Tuesday, September 15, 2026. The name has no official French label: the publisher serves the English name even on its /fr-fr/ pages. Write it in English, don't invent a translation for it. Caution also applies to editions: the announcement gives no platform-specific schedule, the only mention of game versions being the usage clause at the bottom of the page, "will require Minecraft: Bedrock Edition or Java Edition (each sold separately)."

Between now and Tuesday, three shopping runs carry no risk: wool, with a single color being enough if you plan to redye it; wheat, because a travel bed costs 6.75 wheat and you burn through one per night outdoors; and something to dye with. Everything else can wait for the switch.