Minecraft Bedrock v1.26.40.5: Arrows & Vibrant Visuals

Most of v1.26.40.5’s gameplay work lands on arrows. Mojang separated bow shots from crossbow shots, split player projectiles from mob projectiles, and moved their damage onto a velocity-based formula. The furnace recipe book gets an explicit sort order, while the vanilla settings behind Vibrant Visuals arrive as readable pack data.

Arrow Damage Splits Four Ways

The arrow now picks one of four component groups when it spawns: player bow, player crossbow, mob bow, or mob crossbow. The old hard-difficulty and pillager-specific branches are gone. The mob-bow group applies difficulty as a multiplier instead, while crossbows get their own launch power.

Impact damage now starts at zero and uses a power_multiplier of 2.0, so projectile velocity supplies the base damage. Damage is rounded up before a critical-hit multiplier applies. Arrows also knock back targets that successfully block the hit, which makes a shield stop the damage without cancelling all of the impact.

The bounce rule now matches across arrows, thrown tridents, and shulker bullets. All three bounce only when no damage was dealt. A projectile that connects cleanly won’t ricochet as though it missed.

Knockback Rules Settle In

The explicit knockback system introduced in v1.26.20.4 gets another pass. Drowned horizontal knockback drops from 1.5 to 0.6, and the iron golem drops from 1.3 to 0.52. The player’s eleven sulfur-cube knockback presets switch to hit_direction, explicitly scale the target’s current velocity, and use smaller horizontal values.

The calculation changed with the numbers, which makes direct before-and-after comparisons misleading. The data now states which direction wins and how the target’s current velocity enters the calculation instead of encoding the result through angle scales.

The Sulfur Cube gets a few practical adjustments. Its temptation radius is halved from 16 blocks to 8, push interactions no longer require collision overlap, and Frost Walker now protects players from the hot archetype’s magma aura. Its spawn rule also explicitly allows surface spawning inside Sulfur Caves.

Furnace Recipes Get Priorities

The same 131 furnace recipes still produce the same outputs, but each now has a priority field. Values run from 0 to 610, giving the recipe book a stable order across ores, food, equipment recycling, and building-block conversions.

Localization fills in the other half: separate “Smeltable recipes” and “Smokable recipes” search filters, plus screen-reader labels for fuel, input, result, cooking, and smelting states. The priorities and labels make the experimental furnace recipe book look much closer to a finished interface.

Vibrant Visuals Moves Into the Pack

Vanilla’s pack now exposes 17 atmosphere files, 15 lighting profiles, 14 color-grading profiles, and a water profile. They cover the settings used by Vibrant Visuals: sky colors and scattering, sun and moon illumination, biome color temperatures, water caustics, and wave parameters.

Deserts, swamps, pale gardens, mushroom islands, the End, and each Nether biome get named profiles. Resource-pack authors can inspect the actual vanilla values instead of approximating them from the rendered game.

Wall Shapes and the Next Drop

The data-driven collision work continues with 161 wall shapes. Every combination of low and tall north, south, east, and west connections, with or without the center post, now has an explicit voxel shape. Pack tools can finally measure a cobblestone wall in each connection state from the data alone.

One localization string points ahead: “Drop 3 of 2026” promises a new surface biome and abandoned camps. The release includes sounds for poplar leaves, red shrubs, shelf mushrooms, straw beds, and cushions, but their gameplay definitions haven’t arrived yet.

Impact review

The three impact entries above were checked September 5, 2026 by comparing the pinned v1.26.30.5 and v1.26.40.05 sample revisions linked in Sources. They describe observed pack changes and suggested checks; no in-game damage, knockback or lure-distance experiment accompanies this article.