Minecraft Fixes a 15-Year Camping Problem With the New Straw Bed

Mojang shipped a fix for one of Minecraft's oldest annoyances in Preview 26.40.30, released July 7 on the Bedrock testing track. The Straw Bed lets players sleep through the night without setting their spawn point there, something regular beds have forced on players since beds entered the game in 2012. Players craft three Hay Bales into four Straw Beds, and the beds work once: they break after use, or the moment someone places one in the Nether or the End.

Straw Beds also spawn in Abandoned Camps, which grew this update to generate in the Pale Garden and Flower Forest biomes and now scatter trees through the site with procedural placement instead of fixed layouts. Mojang fixed incorrect potion names in the camp loot tables at the same time.

The update pairs the bed with Cushions, a decorative seating block that comes in all 16 wool colors and crafts from three matching Wool Slabs. Cushions can't be moved once placed and break if the block underneath disappears. Mojang flagged in the patch notes that Cushions don't generate in Abandoned Camps yet, so the two features that shipped together this week don't appear together in the world.

The rest of the build cleans up bugs that have sat in Minecraft for months. Fixes cover structure loot that didn't match between identical seeds, a book-and-quill freeze carried over from worlds made before version 26.30, Arrows of Harming that bounced wrong, Azalea leaves that rendered wrong when viewed from below, an Iron Golem spawning crash, and a crash tied to double chests placed during world generation. On the technical side, the /clone command now requires both parts of a selection to sit inside the cloning volume, and entity components get stricter validation starting with format version 1.26.40.

I think the Straw Bed says more about Minecraft's design debt than any single feature update does. Beds have forced a spawn reset for over a decade, and players have built entire storage-and-portal workarounds just to camp without risking their spawn point. I'd bet the missing Cushions in Abandoned Camps are a sequencing gap rather than a design choice, since Mojang flagged it as a known issue instead of framing it as intentional.

None of this is final. Preview and Snapshot builds test features before they land in a full release, and Mojang can still change how Straw Beds or Cushions work before this content reaches the stable version of the game.