Sand

Overview

Sand is the gravity-affected block of deserts, beaches, riverbeds and ocean floors, and it is one of the most consumed materials in any long-running world. Smelted it becomes glass, which is every window, greenhouse and bottle in the game; combined with gravel and dye it becomes concrete powder; and combined with gunpowder it becomes TNT, which is the only ingredient TNT needs besides the powder. Sand falls when the block beneath it is removed, which makes it a hazard when tunnelling under a desert and a tool when you want a self-filling shaft or a trap. It cannot support anything that needs a solid base underneath in some cases, and a falling sand block that lands on a torch or a non-solid block breaks into an item. Red sand, from badlands, behaves identically and smelts into ordinary glass rather than red — a fact worth knowing before hauling a stack home. Sand is also what turtle eggs hatch fastest on and what a desert temple's suspicious sand is made of. Soul sand and red sand are separate blocks with their own behaviour and should not be confused with it.

Glass for windows, greenhouses and bottles, concrete powder for building in flat colour, TNT alongside gunpowder, and the surface that turtle eggs hatch on fastest of any block.

Minecraft classifies Sand as a naturally generated block. It has no crafting recipe — you collect it by mining it where it generates. A hardness of 0.5 means it is one of the quicker blocks to clear.

No specific tool is required to collect it. Broken correctly, it drops itself. It offers almost no protection from explosions (0.5 blast resistance).

A full stack holds 64. It is an ingredient in 19 recipes, among them Black Concrete Powder, Blue Concrete Powder, Brown Concrete Powder and 16 more.

How to get it

Dig it with a shovel from any desert, beach, riverbed or ocean floor. 1 sand smelts into 1 glass, and 4 sand with 4 gravel and 1 dye make 8 concrete powder.

Tips

Red sand smelts into ordinary glass, not red glass, so do not haul it home expecting a colour.
Sand falls when unsupported; place a torch where you want a falling column to break into items.
A desert is effectively an infinite sand supply, so plan large glass builds around finding one first.
Never tunnel directly under a desert surface without watching for the column above you.

How long it takes to break

At a hardness of 0.5, Sand takes 0.75 seconds to punch out and 0.1 seconds with a netherite-tier tool of the correct class.

Iron manages 0.15 seconds and diamond 0.1, which makes diamond the tier that changes how this block feels.

The drop does not depend on the tool — bare hands work as well as anything — so the table below is purely about speed.

Each Efficiency level adds level² + 1 to the tool's speed, so a level V tool clears this about 2 times faster than an unenchanted one.

Tool	No enchantment	Efficiency III	Efficiency V
Hand	0.75 s	0.75 s	0.75 s
Wooden	0.4 s	0.1 s	instant
Stone	0.2 s	0.1 s	instant
Iron	0.15 s	instant	instant
Diamond	0.1 s	instant	instant
Netherite	0.1 s	instant	instant
Golden	0.1 s	instant	instant

Properties

Sand resists blasts at 0.5, which is not enough to survive anything explosive nearby. Light does not pass through it, and it emits none of its own. Stack size is 64 — the standard full stack. It renews, so a single world will never run out. The fastest tool for it is a shovel; any other kind of tool mines it no faster than a bare hand does, because the speed bonus only applies to the tool class the block is tagged for.

Transparent: No
Required tool: Any
Renewable: Yes

Drops

Mined with any, Sand drops itself.

Sand

Used to craft

Sand is an ingredient in 19 recipes, producing Black Concrete Powder, Blue Concrete Powder, Brown Concrete Powder, Cyan Concrete Powder, Gray Concrete Powder, Green Concrete Powder, Light Blue Concrete Powder, Light Gray Concrete Powder, Lime Concrete Powder, Magenta Concrete Powder, Orange Concrete Powder, Pink Concrete Powder, Purple Concrete Powder, Red Concrete Powder, Sandstone, TNT and 3 more.