Mojang Studios confirmed on 26 September, at Minecraft LIVE, that the Sift, the first new dimension in over 14 years, will arrive in Minecraft Java and Bedrock Edition in 2027. Players got their first look yesterday, when Minecraft Dungeons II launched, according to Xbox Wire.
In Dungeons II, the Sift is something you stumble into. The opening stages have the Overworld coming apart: new enemy types show up, souls drift through the world, and it becomes clear something has broken. Inside, everything looks different. The palette is louder, the mobs are new (some companions, some threats), and the rules change. Shifting tides affect your character and the players around you, and hazardous blocks alter how you move through the terrain. Mojang has named two biomes, Meadows and Carapace, and is keeping the rest hidden.
The sequencing is the interesting part. Mojang has a decade and a half of player-built worlds attached to the main game, and a new dimension touches all of them. A spin-off lets the studio put the Sift in front of a large audience, with its mobs, blocks and biomes, without committing the core game to any of it. That is my reading of the move, not something Mojang has said.
What Mojang has said is thin. It isn’t discussing how players will access the Sift in Minecraft, or how the main-game version will differ from Dungeons II’s take on it. Xbox Wire showed a brief in-development look at the dimension running, and pointed readers to Dungeons II as the best way to see what’s coming. Treat what’s in Dungeons II as a taste, not a specification. The two versions may not match.
For South African players, the practical detail is the platform spread. Dungeons II is out on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, Steam, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2. It is included with Game Pass, and Xbox Play Anywhere covers console and PC at no extra cost. That inclusion fits the company’s tilt away from hardware and toward subscriptions and the cloud, which was already visible when Microsoft cut 9 100 jobs across Xbox and sales in 2025. Mojang hasn’t given a 2027 date for the Sift in Minecraft, so future Minecraft LIVE events are where release timing and access details should surface.