Four days before one of the most anticipated Minecraft updates in recent memory reaches players worldwide, Mojang Studios dropped a second release candidate — and the bug it fixed was not a minor visual glitch. A survival-mode player, in the right underground configuration with the right mob geometry, could be permanently trapped in a hole by the Sulfur Cube. That scenario survived eight snapshots and six pre-releases before a tester found it in Release Candidate 1.
Release Candidate 2 — labeled 26.2-rc-2 in the Minecraft Launcher and published on June 12 — addressed two issues Mojang called critical: the Sulfur Cube softlock (MC-308731) and a separate problem where respawning at height limit caused the game to delay placing the player back into the world far longer than intended.
The softlock is a more revealing failure than the patch note lets on. The Sulfur Cube hops around like a slime, carries 8 hit points, and is classified as passive despite spawning under the hostile mob cap. Its central mechanic — a player can hand it a block, which the mob absorbs, disabling its own AI — creates physics interactions no previous Minecraft mob has introduced. When a mob can consume a dirt pillar, a stone wall, or a TNT charge and alter its own physical footprint, the number of possible underground configurations multiplies quickly. The softlock was not a coding error in the traditional sense. It was an edge case that emerged from the mob’s own design working exactly as intended.
Mojang stated in the Release Candidate 1 announcement that if no critical issues were discovered, that build would ship as the final version. It did not. RC2 arrived the following day with two fixes for problems testers had found within hours of RC1 becoming publicly accessible. At the end of a development cycle, that turnaround signals exactly the kind of community stress-testing that catches what internal QA misses.
The broader development pipeline for Chaos Cubed has been extensive by Minecraft standards. The 26.2 cycle ran through eight snapshots, six pre-releases, and now two release candidates — sixteen public builds across several months. That volume of testing did not surface either of the RC2 issues until the final gate. The Hardcore mode LAN exploit, which let players bypass death by opening their world in LAN mode and re-enabling commands, was caught and closed in Pre-Release 5. A bug that prevented players from recovering a Hardcore world after dying under specific conditions followed in Pre-Release 6. The in-game friends list fix came in RC1.
The Chaos Cubed release date — June 16, 2026 — was confirmed at Minecraft Live on May 30, according to GamesRadar. The update arrives simultaneously as Java Edition 26.2 and Bedrock Edition 26.30. Its centerpiece is the Sulfur Caves biome, which generates underground in the Overworld and introduces a new set of environmental hazards: geysers that launch anything caught inside them, noxious gas clouds that drift upward from sulfur pools and trigger nausea in players who breathe them, and underwater sulfur deposits that generate bubble columns at the surface. The biome ships with full block sets in both sulfur and cinnabar — the latter a red rock native to the cave system — along with their complete slabs, stairs, walls, and brick variants.
The Sulfur Cube itself is the mob the biome was built around. It absorbs blocks a player hands it, changing its own behavior and physical properties based on what it consumes. Shearing an absorbed block out of the mob returns it to the player. The interaction system sits closer to a puzzle mechanic than a combat one, and its depth is precisely why the softlock scenario took sixteen builds to surface: no single test run exhausts the configurations a player can engineer with a mob that responds directly to input. According to the Minecraft Wiki’s documentation of the build, the exact mechanism Mojang used to resolve MC-308731 is not detailed in the public patch notes.
The peer-to-peer multiplayer feature — which allowed players to connect directly without a dedicated server and which generated significant attention during the snapshot phase — was pulled in Pre-Release 1. Mojang said the experience was not ready for all players. It will not be part of the June 16 release. What does ship is a rebuilt friends list, accessible from the title screen and the pause menu, with opt-in presence sharing managed through Online Options and Microsoft account safety settings.
The Hardcore mode changes that arrived in the pre-release phase are also in the final package. The gaming industry’s ongoing content arms race has pushed Mojang to address long-standing exploits as part of each drop, and Chaos Cubed is no exception. Both the gamemode-switching path and the commands-via-LAN workaround through which players had bypassed Hardcore death for years are closed. For a community that has built an entire content genre around Hardcore survival — hundred-day series, streamer challenge runs, community speed records — the closure redefines what a completed Hardcore world means. There is no longer a way to interpret the achievement as ambiguous.
What Mojang has not published is the specific fix applied to the Sulfur Cube softlock. The patch note confirms the condition is resolved. Whether the fix constrained the mob’s physics in specific spatial configurations, adjusted hitbox calculations for the hole geometry, or introduced a teleportation fallback is not documented. That gap will matter to the broader gaming modding community, which will begin disassembling the release build the moment it goes live Monday.
Release Candidate 2 is available now through the Minecraft Launcher for players running the Java Edition snapshot channel. The stable global release follows on June 16 — barring any further critical issues found before Monday.
