Sand icon PNG

Sand in Minecraft: gravity, farms and tricks

Sand is plentiful in deserts and beaches, in layers about four blocks deep with sandstone underneath, and it makes up the floor of warm and lukewarm oceans. It also forms patches under the shallow water of rivers and lakes. A shovel is the right tool.

It is one of the few blocks with gravity. Remove what is under it and it falls to the next solid block, and if it lands on a player's or mob's head it suffocates them. If it lands on a torch, rail or slab it turns into an item. Be careful mining upwards in a desert, and standing on sand pillars: if one collapses onto something non-solid you can fall fast enough to get hurt.

You need it to farm cactus, it also works for sugar cane, bamboo and kelp, and turtle eggs only hatch on sand. Smelted, it becomes glass. A handy trick: TNT does not break blocks when it explodes underwater, but it does if falling sand covers it first.

Oddly, it is barely renewable. The wandering trader sells 8 sand for one emerald, and that is the only renewable way to get it.

Sources: minecraft.wiki/Sand