Minecraft Cushion Arrives As Xbox Announces 3,200 Layoffs

Minecraft just landed its first official way to sit down, two snapshots before the next drop ships. Snapshot 3 for Minecraft 26.3 went live in the Java snapshot and Bedrock preview & beta, adding a 16-color Cushion item and a single-use Straw Bed that lets players sleep through the night without resetting their spawn point. The drop landed on a Tuesday, four days after Xbox CEO Asha Sharma sent a staff memo confirming 3,200 Xbox job cuts across fiscal year 2027, 1,600 of them eliminated that Monday, and moving Mojang and King directly under her oversight.

The new furniture items are the smallest things in the patch in lines of code and the biggest things for a feature request that has sat in Minecraft’s suggestion queue since the game’s release year. The wider parent-company shake-up touched every other Xbox studio in the memo’s wording, and stopped one tier short of Mojang’s front door.

The Cushion Lands After 17 Years

Mojang’s snapshot page describes the Cushion as the item “the player can place in the world and interact with to sit on.” It is crafted using three Wool Slabs of the same color, one Cushion per recipe, and ships in 16 color variants matching the wool dye set. Cushions always align horizontally to the grid, vertically sit on top of the supporting surface, have no collision, and can overlap with other objects except other Cushions.

The lack of collision is the trick that makes them useful to builders. Cushions can be placed on the lower part of Wood Stairs without clipping, turning any staircase into a working bench or a seat without any extra work. A walkthrough of the cushion patch notes that Mojang has “clearly already anticipated this as a popular trick, ensuring there’s no awkward clipping” for the upper-wood-stair cushion combo. Cushions placed on Buttons or Pressure Plates break when sat on, because the supporting block moves.

PCGamesN frames this as the proper seat Minecraft has been missing for the duration of its existence: a feature “after 17 years, Steve can finally sit down.” Mojang’s own tease for the snapshot doubled down on the campsite framing.

“Weary from all that hiking? Seek out an abandoned camp to rest your blocky bones on the Cushion.”

The full patch notes for the snapshot including Cushion and Straw Bed are on the Minecraft 26.3 Snapshot 3 page.

The Straw Bed That Does Not Reset Spawn

The Straw Bed is a separate feature layered on top of the existing bed system. Crafted from three Hay Bales, it returns four Straw Beds per recipe, stackable to 16, and is consumed on use. The snapshot page calls it a Bed “which can be used to sleep through the night without setting your spawnpoint.” One sleep, then the bed disappears.

Travel is the obvious use case. Mojang designed a bed you can throw into a hot bar for a one-night push into unmapped territory without committing to a new spawn. The constraint carries weight: per the straw bed mechanics page, “unlike beds and respawn anchors, straw beds do not explode if the player attempts to use them in an incorrect dimension (i.e the Nether or the End); it will instead destroy itself and drop nothing as if the player slept in it.” Villagers will not claim a straw bed and never count it as a bed for breeding. There is a new Statistics window counter for nights slept in a Straw Bed, sitting next to the existing sleep counter.

The Third Drop of 2026 Roster Beyond Furniture

Cushion and Straw Bed are landing through the test lanes because they are part of the third game drop of 2026, an unnamed update scheduled for Q3 2026 and first unveiled at Minecraft Live – May 2026 in Rotterdam. The drop is the most builder-leaning update of the year so far.

• Dappled Forest biome – spruce and poplar trees with red, orange, and yellow leaves on an orange-brown grass and coarse-dirt soil covered by leaf litter, red shrubs, and brown mushrooms (from the Dappled Forest wiki entry)
• Poplar wood set – planks, stairs, slab, sign, hanging sign, button, pressure plate, door, fence, fence gate, trapdoor, and shelf, in warm gray tones (from the third drop item roster)
• Wool slabs and Wool stairs – the same blocks that feed the Cushion craft, all 16 colors (from the snapshot article)
• Shelf mushrooms – a new mushroom variant that grows naturally on poplar and fallen poplar trees, grows larger with bone meal, and breaks into two items (from the third drop wiki)
• Abandoned Camp – a new surface structure that generates in any biome, often with loot in chests or barrels, and the source of Mojang’s “rest your blocky bones” tease (from the third drop wiki)

The Dappled Forest already runs as a Bedrock experiment in Bedrock Edition 26.40, and the rest of the drop follows through Java snapshot 26.3 and the Bedrock preview & beta pipeline. Some features, like the Poplar Wood set, were already on the public test path through snapshot 1 of the cycle. The third drop’s framing makes clear that the QoL wins for builders, sitting, cushioned seating, thatched roofing with floating straw beds, a mushroom that doubles as a parkour prop, are packaged together on purpose.

The next stage of the cycle is the drop launch. Q3 2026 is the release quarter on the wiki’s published timeline, with bug update cycles (1 through 5) running into the end of the year after that. The studio behind it is now the same studio whose reporting line moved up on Monday.

Inside Microsoft’s Most Significant Restructure

The cushion patch went live the day after Xbox’s biggest layoff round hit. Sharma sent a staff memo on Monday, July 6, 2026, calling the changes “the most significant restructure in XBOX history.” 3,200 roles are being cut across fiscal year 2027, including 1,600 eliminated that same day. Microsoft is laying off 4,800 employees companywide, with more than 30% of the cuts sitting inside the gaming division.

By the numbers from the Monday memo

• 3,200 – Xbox roles cut across FY27
• 1,600 – eliminated on July 6, 2026
• ~20% – the share of the Xbox workforce the memo adds up to
• 4,800 – Microsoft-wide layoffs on the same Monday
• 64¢ – the per-dollar loss on some of the studios in a typical year

The 64-cent figure is the cleanest statement of the problem Sharma is trying to fix. From her memo: “We have also learned that we are not the best home for every type of studio; in a typical year, we lost 64 cents for every dollar we invested.” She framed the business as “not healthy,” pointed at margins “3-10x lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses,” and named Game Pass and multi-platform expansion as bets that “did not grow at the pace we expected.”

“We are beginning the most significant restructure in XBOX history.”

The memo lays out the consequences for first-party studios outside of Mojang. Compulsion Games and Double Fine Productions return to management and transition to independent studios with their IP and catalog. Ninja Theory and Undead Labs have entered terms to join new ownership, with funding to finish Senua and State of Decay 3. Arkane Lyon has begun required Works Council consultation over strategic options, with Marvel’s Blade on the line. Management layers are being cut from a peak of 14 down to no more than 5, vendor spending is being cut 50%, and a new chief operating officer role is being created. The full Monday memo is posted on Xbox Wire, and The Verge’s breakdown of the layoff round lays out the companywide 4,800 figure.

Why Minecraft Was Reported, Not Spun Off

Mojang and King were the two studios Monday’s memo moved up the chart. “Mojang and King will now report directly to me,” Sharma wrote, framing them as “platforms” and “our largest by monthly active players” – the assets that bring demographic and geographic reach to Xbox. Helen Chiang, the long-time Minecraft franchise lead, was promoted to the new chief operating officer role over content, hardware, platform, and services.

Critically, Minecraft sits on the memo’s list of games that are not being canceled. IGN’s account of the memo reads the “not being cancelled” clause as covering “Fable, Gears of War: E-Day, Clockwork Revolution, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, Minecraft Dungeons 2, and The Elder Scrolls 6.” Bloomberg, separately reported by Aakash Gupta citing the Bloomberg write-up, has described Xbox as historically using Minecraft profits to fund the rest of the gaming division – a framing that puts the cushion patch on the same Monday morning calendar as Sharma’s restructuring call.

What survives and what leaves the building, side by side under the reset:

For a sense of how the cut landed at one studio, id Software lost roughly half its staff in the same round. And Sharma’s earlier “tough decisions” memo, sent days before the Xbox Games Showcase, had already telegraphed the math behind the cuts.

The Blocky Bottom Line

The cushion and straw bed ship as planned. The third drop of 2026 still lands in Q3 2026 with Dappled Forest, poplar wood, wool slabs and stairs, shelf mushrooms, and the Abandoned Camp. Mojang now sits at the top of the Xbox reporting chart, rather than the middle of it. The first-party games memo Microsoft named as not being canceled, including Minecraft Dungeons 2, keep their slots.

Snapshots are public testing builds, and they tend to ship on the second Tuesday of a planned drop’s cycle. Tuesday this week gave players the cushion. Monday gave Microsoft the restructure memo. Drop 3 of 2026 falls on the next release date on the studio’s calendar.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you craft a Cushion in Minecraft?

Place three Wool Slabs of the same color in any row of a crafting grid to make one Cushion. Cushions ship in all 16 wool dye colors and can be placed on any flat surface, including the lower half of a Wood Stair, with no clipping.

Does the Straw Bed set your spawn point?

No, that is the point of the item. Sleeping in a Straw Bed fast-forwards the night without changing where the player respawns, and the Straw Bed breaks after one use, whether you wake at morning or leave mid-sleep. The same behavior applies if you try to sleep in the Nether or The End; the Straw Bed breaks without exploding.

When does the third Minecraft drop of 2026 ship?

The third drop of 2026, the unnamed update carrying the Dappled Forest biome, the Poplar wood set, Wool slabs and stairs, Shelf mushrooms, the Abandoned Camp, the Cushion, and the Straw Bed, is scheduled for Q3 2026.

Is Minecraft being canceled or delayed by the Xbox cuts?

Microsoft’s July 6 memo lists Minecraft Dungeons 2 among first-party games that “are not being cancelled as part of these reductions.” Mojang and King are now reporting directly to Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and are described in the memo as “our largest studios by monthly active players.”

Was Mojang hit by the Microsoft layoffs?

The memo names Mojang among “Activision, Bethesda/ZeniMax, Blizzard, King, Mojang, and XBOX Game Studios” where “changes vary in size,” but does not give a Mojang-specific headcount. Mojang is not being spun off or sent to new ownership; it is being moved up the reporting line.