Mojang has added Snow Bricks to Minecraft through 26.4 Snapshot 6, a new building block crafted from ordinary Snow Blocks that comes with slab, stair and wall variants.
Key points
- Minecraft 26.4 Snapshot 6 introduces Snow Bricks, crafted from four Snow Blocks in a 2×2 grid.
- Snow Bricks have slab, stair and wall variants, all made on a crafting table since a Stonecutter does not work.
- The blocks require a shovel to mine and drop nothing if broken with any other tool.
- Snow Bricks give Sulfur Cubes the Fast Sliding archetype, making the cubes slide like a hockey puck.
- The feature appears in a development snapshot and has no confirmed release date for the full 26.4 update.
The addition gives builders a new winter-themed material just weeks after the Packed Ice Bricks debuted in an earlier snapshot. For players working on frozen builds in Minecraft, Snow Bricks fill a gap that snow layers and plain snow blocks never quite covered, since snow blocks melt or look flat when used for detailed structures.
What You Need to Craft Snow Bricks
The core ingredient is the Snow Block, found in snowy plains, slopes, ice spikes, frozen peaks, jagged peaks and igloo walls. Players who lack a Silk Touch shovel can still get the job done: breaking a snow block drops Snowballs, and four of them combine back into a Snow Block. From there, crafting requires only a Crafting Table and a shovel to pick the blocks back up once placed.
Crafting Steps for Snow Bricks and Their Variants
Making the base block is simple. Place four Snow Blocks in a 2×2 square in any corner of the crafting grid, then move the four resulting Snow Bricks to the inventory. No fuel or rare materials are involved, mirroring the recipe for Minecraft‘s Packed Ice Bricks.
- Snow Brick Stairs: three bricks in the first column, two in the remaining cells of the third row, and one in the center.
- Snow Brick Slabs: three bricks placed in any three cells of a single horizontal row.
- Snow Brick Walls: six bricks placed across two adjacent rows of the crafting grid.
All three variants are made on a Crafting Table. Unlike Packed Ice Bricks, which can be cut with a Stonecutter, Snow Bricks and their variants cannot be produced that way, according to the Minecraft Wiki.
How Snow Bricks Behave and Where They Fit
Snow Bricks are mainly decorative, but they interact with Sulfur Cubes, a mechanic Mojang has been expanding in recent snapshots. A Sulfur Cube that absorbs Snow Bricks gains the Fast Sliding archetype, causing it to slide across surfaces like a hockey puck, which opens up options for simple minigames. The same snapshot adds a related Cold Sulfur Cube archetype tied to Blue Ice, which creates a disk of Frosted Ice beneath the cube as it moves, similar to the effect of the Frost Walker enchantment.
Unlike snow layers, Snow Bricks do not melt in warm temperatures, so they hold up in builds set in Plains or Cherry Grove biomes as well as snowy ones. The one catch: breaking a Snow Brick with anything other than a shovel destroys it instead of dropping it, the same rule that applies to ordinary snow blocks.
Part of a Larger Winter Content Push
Snow Bricks follow directly from the Packed Ice Bricks added in 26.4 Snapshot 5, which also introduced a new advancement and bug fixes, a process covered in detail in the guide on Minecraft Java’s crafting steps. Mojang has been testing ice caves, frostbite effects and brittle ice across several snapshots, with Snow Bricks and the new Sulfur Cube archetypes extending that work rather than closing it out.
Both Snow Bricks and Packed Ice Bricks remain confined to development snapshots for now. Mojang has not announced a release date for the full 26.4 winter update, and it is unclear whether Snow Bricks will eventually get a chiseled variant, something Packed Ice Bricks already received.
