Minecraft's new, free inventory-expanding backpack has been eating players' loot

Your Minecraft inventory can fill up rather quickly once you start exploring, so having a bit more space to hand is a welcome boon. There have almost always been ways to do this with the help of Minecraft mods, but this week Mojang showed off a new addition to the Minecraft Marketplace that is too good to pass up. The Herschel Backpack Trials add-on is free, and when you've finished upgrading it you'll have access to 16 pages of space, for a total of 384 slots. There's just one problem: some players are logging in to find their bags mysteriously empty.

The new add-on is a collaboration with Herschel, and arrived alongside an actual backpack of the same design, which is just one of a wide variety of Minecraft-themed accessories being sold by the company. The real-world dirt block edition sold out rather rapidly, but you can easily get your in-game version for free from the Minecraft Marketplace. It comes with a series of challenges to complete, which gradually upgrade the amount of pages in your bag, along with adding other useful optional features such as automatic sorting, depositing, restocking, smelting, and even a handy lantern.

There's a soul bound feature, too, ensuring the backpack stays with you if your exploration turns fatal. Unfortunately, some players have reported that after logging out and then returning to their worlds later, the items they had left in their backpack were all gone. One user even says that they tested this a second time: "I tried to repeat this by loading the pack up with stuff, exiting the game, and entering again, and once again, the pack items were gone."

Several other players have responded saying that they have also fallen foul of this item-snatching bug. "I had been mining for five hours," writes one distraught adventurer. Another says they still ran into the issue with the soul bond upgrade enabled. The original poster has also submitted a bug report for this via Mojang's support system, which remains marked as 'unresolved' at the time of writing.

It's worth noting that the number of reports for this are relatively few, while the backpack add-on boasts a very respectable 4.5 stars on the Minecraft Marketplace, so it's likely that the issue is only affecting a small number of players. With the sheer amount of stuff you could theoretically be cramming into the backpack over the course of a play session, however, even a tiny chance of having it all vanish is potentially morale-shattering.

Given that Mojang has been promoting the new Herschel Backpack add-on via its main channel, this nasty bug will probably get priority attention soon enough. For the time being, however, you might want to just play it safe and make sure that you empty out your backpack before logging off for the day.