Key takeaways
- Snow Bricks craft from 2×2 Snow Blocks and come with slab, stair and wall variants, but the Stonecutter will not make them.
- They only drop themselves when mined with a shovel, which is a first for a brick-family block.
- The Cold Sulfur Cube is a new archetype that floats and lays a disk of Frosted Ice beneath itself as it moves.
The winter game drop has spent five snapshots adding ice. Snapshot 6, published 27 October, finally does something with the other half of the palette – snow. Snow Bricks give the block a brick family for the first time in the game’s history, which matters because snow has always been the flattest building material available and the one with the fewest shapes.
Alongside it comes a Sulfur Cube variant that behaves like a walking Frost Walker enchantment, and a change to Java’s default memory allocation that quietly affects every player. Here is what is in the build.
Snow Bricks
Four Snow Blocks in a 2×2 give you Snow Bricks. From there you get a Slab, a Stair and a Wall variant. Three details separate this family from the others added this cycle:
- The Stonecutter will not cut them. Mojang states this explicitly – Snow Brick slabs, stairs and walls cannot be made in a Stonecutter. Packed Ice Bricks can. This is a deliberate asymmetry, not an oversight.
- They only drop themselves if mined with a shovel. Mine with a pickaxe or by hand and you get nothing back. That is unusual – brick-family blocks normally want a pickaxe, and this one inherits snow’s tool rule instead.
- There is no chiselled variant, unlike the Packed Ice Brick family.
The Stonecutter exclusion has a real cost. Our Stonecutter guide covers why cutting stairs saves a third of your material – six blocks for four stairs through a crafting table, one for one through a cutter. Snow Brick stairs are stuck on the expensive route.
Snow is cheap to make up for it. Four snowballs make a Snow Block, and a snow golem or a shovel in any snowy biome produces snowballs without limit. The material cost is time rather than scarcity, which is the opposite of packed ice.
What this does for cold builds
The problem with snow as a building material has always been that it has no shapes and no pattern. Snow Block is a cube with a flat white texture. Snow Layers give you eight heights and nothing else. You could build a mass out of snow but not a structure.
A brick texture and three shapes change that. Combined with the Packed Ice Brick family from Snapshot 5, a cold build now has two patterned materials in slightly different values – snow reads warmer and lighter, packed ice reads cooler and bluer – which is enough to build a facade with structure and infill rather than one flat mass.
Our Packed Ice Brick guide covers the three-value system that applies here too, and our cold palette guide covers the contrast material you still need – snow against snowy terrain disappears no matter how good the texture is.
Snow Bricks also belong to the Fast Sliding Sulfur Cube archetype, which puts them in the same movement group as the ice brick family.
The Cold Sulfur Cube
A new archetype in the special category, with the Fast Sliding properties plus two behaviours of its own:
- It floats on water rather than sinking.
- When it moves, it replaces the water below it with a disk of Frosted Ice, the way the Frost Walker enchantment does.
Two conditions gate the ice placement. There must be air above the water block, and the cube only places Frosted Ice if it starts its movement while on the ground. So a cube dropped into open water does not immediately freeze a path – it has to be moving from a surface.
You get one by having a Sulfur Cube absorb a Blue Ice block. That is the only route, which makes it a deliberate crafting step rather than something you stumble into.
Frosted Ice is the detail worth knowing. It melts on its own over time, which means a Cold Sulfur Cube leaves a temporary path rather than a permanent bridge. Our powder snow and freezing guide covers how that melt timer works and what it means for crossing water.
The JVM change
Buried in the Changes section and more consequential than anything else in the build: the game now automatically sets its Java heap size based on your system’s RAM, using up to 25 percent with a maximum of 4 GB.
Previously Minecraft shipped with a fixed default allocation that was too small for modern systems and too large for old ones, and every guide to running modded Minecraft started with “go change your allocated memory”. That default is now adaptive.
The 4 GB ceiling is the part to understand. A machine with 64 GB of RAM gets 4 GB, not 16. For vanilla that is generous. For a large modpack it is often not enough, and you will still be setting it manually. Our performance mod roundup goes through what to set and when.
Smaller changes
- All Packed Ice Brick variants now require a pickaxe to drop themselves – previously they did not, which was almost certainly a bug given how the rest of the family behaves.
- Brittle Ice no longer cracks when a Stray is standing on it, joining the Frostbite as a mob that can cross it safely.
- Ice Crystals gained an ambient sound, which plays only when the crystal has a block of Packed Ice below it.
- Mobs falling through lava may take slightly less fall damage in some cases.
The Stray exception is the interesting one. Two of the mobs that spawn in Ice Caves now ignore the floor hazard that is meant to make the biome dangerous, which narrows Brittle Ice to a player-only trap. Our coverage of the snapshot that added it has the block’s full rules.
Our read
Snow Bricks are the right addition made slightly awkwardly. The material needed shapes and now has them, but the Stonecutter exclusion means the one family that would benefit most from cheap stair conversion is the one that cannot use it. Snow is renewable so the cost is recoverable, but it is friction with no obvious design reason behind it.
The Cold Sulfur Cube is the more creative piece. A block that lays a temporary ice path as it travels is a transport mechanic, a puzzle element and a hazard depending on where you put it, and it got there by combining two systems that already existed rather than by adding a third. That is the kind of design this drop has been good at.
Images: Photon Shaders project gallery.