Smooth Sandstone Stairs — Minecraft block

Overview

In Minecraft 1.21.4, Smooth Sandstone Stairs is a building block. Smooth Sandstone Stairs has a crafting recipe, so it is renewable as long as you can source its ingredients. At a hardness of 2 it takes a moment to break but never slows a build down.

It needs at least a wooden pickaxe to drop anything; a weaker tool destroys it for nothing. Mining it returns the block itself, so it is safe to relocate. A full stack holds 64.

It is crafted from Smooth Sandstone. The stonecutter is the cheaper route: one Smooth Sandstone gives one of these. No recipe takes it as an ingredient.

How long it takes to break

Hardness 2 puts Smooth Sandstone Stairs at 10 seconds a block bare-handed, or 0.35 seconds with the right tool at netherite tier.

Iron takes 0.5 seconds against diamond's 0.4, so the upgrade worth making for this block is the one to iron.

The block still breaks with a weaker tool, but below wooden it yields nothing at all — the time is spent and the drop is lost, which is the single most common way players waste a vein.

Each Efficiency level adds level² + 1 to the tool's speed, so a level V tool clears this about 3.5 times faster than an unenchanted one.

* breaks the block but yields no drop
Tool	No enchantment	Efficiency III	Efficiency V
Hand *	10 s	10 s	10 s
Wooden	1.5 s	0.25 s	0.15 s
Stone	0.75 s	0.25 s	0.1 s
Iron	0.5 s	0.2 s	0.1 s
Diamond	0.4 s	0.2 s	0.1 s
Netherite	0.35 s	0.2 s	0.1 s
Golden	0.25 s	0.15 s	0.1 s

Properties

With 6 blast resistance Smooth Sandstone Stairs usually goes down to a nearby explosion. It is fully opaque and produces no light. 64 fit in a slot — a full stack. A pickaxe is fastest here; any other class mines it at bare-hand speed, because the bonus only applies to the class the block is tagged for. As furnace fuel it burns for 15 seconds — one and a half smelting operations.

Transparent: No
Required tool: Wooden Pickaxe
Fuel value: 15 s