Sand Block
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Youtube Video Demonstration / Guide [Link]
Script
Sand Blocks in the Game World
Sand Blocks can be found in abundance in three locations in Minecraft. The first most obvious place being the Desert Biome. Sand can generally be found as far as the eye can see in such locations along the surface, with little else other than Cacti serving as landmarks. Sand can also be found in other biomes along coasts, rivers, and at the bottom of lakes and the sea.
It should be noted that Sandstone will usually be found 5 layers underneath sand. This is important to note and brings us to our next point; sand has a special properly, shared only with Gravel in that it can be affected by gravity. Basically how this works is: Sand will exist as a normal block, until there is no longer a block underneath supporting it, which is in most cases going to be Sandstone. Once this support is removed, sand will fall until it hits another block that breaks its fall, in which it will then revert back into being a Sand block in the game world. Of special note, is that if sand lands on a block that is not solid, such as a Torch, Slab, Redstone, or Rail Track, the sand block will be destroyed. This can be exploited to quickly harvest large amounts of sand in a column, and is most practically used to speed up sand harvesting by destroying the supporting layer of Sandstone underneath it.
Do make note that due to the falling nature of sand, it is possible to cover yourself in sand, which will then suffocate you, slowly eating away at your hitpoints. Never dig around sand above you (sometimes during world creation caves will cut into sand pieces and leave them 'floating' once the world is created.) Poke at such blocks at your own risk!
Like Dirt, Sand is not very resistant to explosions. We here at Minecraft Unversity pride ourselves in taking advantage of any chance we can get to play with explosions. For Science! Well that wasn't so bad...right then.
Special Uses for Sand
One neat trick you can use sand for is determining direction if you are lost. If you look closely down at the top of a Sand block, you will find a pixel in one of the corner is much darker than the rest. This corner always points North West and can be used to reliably find your way.
The special gravity property of sand makes it a good choice for reaching hard to access locations below you. By dropping a column of sand blocks you can then quickly and safely dig down to safety using a Shovel. Sand also works well with Pistons, for things like hidden lava bridges and suffocation traps.
Sand as an Item
You can dig sand extremely fast with a shovel, but any tool will quickly drop a resource, including fisticuffs. You can also stack sand up to 64 units in your inventory.
Sand can be smelted into glass using a furnace and some form of fuel such as coal. It is most effficient to melt sand into glass in large batches so that you do not waste fuel.
Sand can be crafted into Sandstone by combining 4 pieces of sand in a square. If you want to conduct some experiments of your own, or just want to troll your neighbors by making excessively loud explosions at innapropiate times, then you might want to construct some tnt explosives. You can craft these using 4 blocks of sand and 5 units of gunpowder in a criss-cross pattern.
