17 years later, Minecraft is finally adding somewhere to sit

You might want to sit down for this one. Some 17 years after its release, Minecraft is finally adding somewhere for weary adventurers to rest their flagging posteriors: cushions are now available as part of the survival blockbuster’s latest preview build, with a full release planned for later this year.

Minecraft hasn’t been entirely devoid of places for players to relax and recline previously, of course – beds were added all the way back in 2011. But the introduction of craftable cushions means Mojang is now catering for players who prefer their respite to be mostly horizontal and their buttocks to be gently supported. Cushions – reasonably described as “an item that the player can place in the world and interact with to sit on” – are available in 16 colour variants and require three Wool Slabs of the same colour to build.

Horizontally inclined practitioners of relaxation, meanwhile, can enjoy Minecraft’s new straw beds, usefully enabling players to sleep through the night without setting their spawn point. The catch? Straw beds are destroyed after a single use and won’t work at all in the Nether or The End. On the plus side, you’ll get four straw beds out of three Hay Bales.

Cushions and straw beds are available to anyone who’s opted into Minecraft Preview, and the latest update – officially preview version 26.40.30 – brings various other changes and tweaks, as outlined in Mojang’s patch notes. These include the addition of abandoned camps in the Pale Garden and Flower Forest biomes, and improvements to the Dappled Forest. Expect all this stuff to make it into Minecraft proper sometime later this year.

Less happily, Mojang is just one of many Xbox-owned studios to be impacted by Microsoft’s devastating layoffs this week, which saw over 3,200 employees across some of the gaming’s most recognisable studios lose their jobs.

The cuts are part of what Xbox CEO Asha Sharma called the “most significant” Xbox restructuring in history, impacting the likes of Activision, Bethesda/ZeniMax, Blizzard, King, and numerous other development teams under the Xbox Game Studios umbrella. Some of these studios – Double Fine, Compulsion Games, Ninja Theory, and Undead Labs – are all set to go independent, while Arkane Lyon’s future is still unclear.