Mojang adds secret Chiseled Soulshale block to Minecraft Snapshot

On Nov. 3, 2026, Mojang placed a decorative block called Chiseled Soulshale into Minecraft 26.4 Snapshot 7, a pre-release test version.

Its appearance is dull green like Warped Planks, and it carries the Warped Stem map color. Any tool breaks it, though a pickaxe works fastest. The block resists blasts at level 6, has hardness 2, stacks to 64, and does not burn or give off light.

The block spawns only inside Ancient City loot chests, showing up 23% of the time. The studio has not confirmed a direct tie to the Sift dimension. Mojang describes the block as purely decorative and says it has no confirmed gameplay function.

Chiseled Soulshale shows the carved face of the Singer, a mob from Minecraft Dungeons 2. Internal game files label the Singer “HealthyWarden,” linking it to the Warden that appears in Ancient Cities.

Mojang meant Snapshot 7 to be the final snapshot before the winter drop. Mojang’s official patch notes for the snapshot covered calcite building blocks and the new music disc rather than the secret decorative block. Dataminers located Chiseled Soulshale inside the game files after Mojang left it out of the official patch notes. Community creators silentwisperer and MintRefresh spread word of the discovery on X, writing, “Minecraft just added the first new Sift block.”

The snapshot introduced a full range of Calcite building blocks: pillar, stairs, slab, and wall variants. The update also contains a music disc called Flurry by Hyper Potions, found in igloo basement chests.

You can find the block in Bedrock Edition Preview 26.70.23, though the Creative inventory does not include it and the /give command will not summon it. Players on Java Edition reach the snapshot by updating the Minecraft Java Edition launcher and turning on snapshots in the installations tab. The stable winter drop for Minecraft 26.4 will gather every snapshot released so far into a single release containing Chiseled Soulshale.

Mojang unveiled the Sift during Minecraft Live on Sept. 26, 2026, calling it the game’s fourth dimension and its first new one in more than 14 years. Right now, Minecraft has three dimensions: the Overworld, the Nether, and the End. All three arrived when the game left public alpha and beta testing in November 2011. The dimension reaches Java and Bedrock Edition in 2027, though Mojang has not set a precise date.

The studio has confirmed just one new mob for the base-game Sift: the Blub. The Blub is a small, passive rabbit-like creature that can squeak. Every other feature and block keeps a deliberately generic name until Mojang shares official information.

Descriptions of the Sift call it a vibrant dimension full of souls, with a bright turquoise sky above saturated pink ground. Two Sift biomes exist. Singer’s Meadow uses red sculk. Carapace looks like a desert-like zone with blue walls and large empty fossils.

Players will enter the Sift from the Overworld through the Ancient City in the Deep Dark biome, home of the Warden, and it will reach Java and Bedrock Edition in 2027. In Minecraft Dungeons II, mysterious rifts carry heroes to the Sift ahead of its arrival on Java and Bedrock Edition in 2027.

Dungeons II brought the Sift into the game at its Sept. 29, 2026 launch. Polygon presents Dungeons II as the first stop for Sift content before it reaches Java and Bedrock Edition.

Players ask whether the block could help activate a Sift portal or the long-abandoned Ancient City portal. Some players speculate that the Flurry music disc and new Jukebox texture in Snapshot 7 point to a musical sequence for opening a portal. Other players believe Chiseled Soulshale may belong to a larger Soulshale blockset of building materials linked to the Sift dimension. HerCampus says most of its Sift mob details come from community speculation, and that not all Dungeons II content will necessarily reach vanilla Minecraft.

Mods based on Dungeons II have players blow a goat horn to summon the Singer at the Ancient City portal, set a note block on eight specific blocks, and play the sequence the Singer guides them through to light the portal. Using the goat horn turns a former collector’s item into a key for reaching the Ancient City portal. The HerCampus author said, “Again, blowing the goat horn is another use for what was previously a collector’s object!” The Singer lives in the Meadow, looks like a passive blue Warden, can be traded with in many mods, and serves as the peaceful keeper of the Ancient City portal in the story.

A dark teal rock serves as the Sift’s stone, and while it matches chiseled soulshale in color, no one knows whether the two are connected. Reveal footage for the Sift shows cliffs measuring at least a dozen blocks high and tree-like structures that suggest height gaps of several dozen blocks. Mobs in the Dungeons II version of the Sift include Blub, Echo Golem, Monarch, and the Singer.

The Echo Golem, or Caretaker Golem, helps the player by carrying soul blocks. In mods, it hands them to the Singer or to players who tame it using an Echo Shard. Dungeons II lets players unlock the Blub as a pet, and some mods add tamable Blubs that fight hostile Sift mobs, though vanilla Minecraft has not confirmed this.

minecraft.pl says Mojang often hides small clues about bigger, distant updates in regular drops, and that a nonfunctional decorative block fits a pattern of gauging community reaction before sharing full details. Previous builds in the 26.4 cycle included Packed Ice Bricks, experimental DirectX support from Snapshot 5, and Snow Bricks from an earlier snapshot.