Mojang says that Minecraft Dungeons 2 has more overt "callbacks to vanilla Minecraft" than the last ARPG it released

Minecraft Dungeons 2 asks you to drop your pickaxe, pick up a sword, and venture into the deep dark (among other locations) with your buddies. This upcoming ARPG has always been lobbied as an approachable dungeon crawler, the sort that provides a pretty cheery alternative to a game like Path of Exile 2 or a way for those who grew up playing Diablo to share love of the genre with their kids. Something Minecraft Dungeons was never great at, however, was having all that many connection points with the core Minecraft experience – you know, visual design aside and all that.

As Mojang approached the development of Minecraft Dungeons 2, design director Laura de Llorens tells me that the team went looking for ways to include more distinct "callbacks to vanilla Minecraft" without diluting what made the 2020 original special. One way is the introduction of an "interconnected world" – not a full open-world, but one that's wide enough to encourage exploration.

Beyond that, Minecraft Dungeons 2 has made some tweaks to its item rarity systems and its character customisation options. Let's start with rarity. Minecraft offers four rarity tiers in Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Epic; the first Minecraft Dungeons game only had three. Minecraft Dungeons 2 arrives with four rarity levels – Common, Rare, Special, and Unique – in an attempt to better capture that sense of item-scale that the vanilla experience is known for.

As for character customization, Minecraft Dungeons 2 has a more expansive system in play. "Instead of one armor slot, you now have four – again, we're calling back a little more to vanilla Minecraft, which also has four." This means you can now equip armor on your head, arms, legs, and torso; with unique variants which can provide "double effects, special enchantments, and all that good stuff," de Llorens teases.

These are small changes that have a big impact on the way Minecraft Dungeons 2 plays, and offer a few more points of connective tissue for fans of the core Minecraft experience. I suspect that the full game will offer even more in this respect, but we'll likely have to wait until September 29, 2026 to discover them all – that's when Minecraft Dungeons 2 releases for PC, PS5, Nintendo Switch 2, and Xbox Series X.

Minecraft Dungeons 2 hands-on preview: I played Mojang's new dungeon crawler, and it may just be one of the most exciting new games of 2026.