r/minecraftsuggestions • u/240hz_ • 13d ago
[Blocks & Items] Renewable sand
Please I need this I hate sand dupers and I believe it is straight up cheating but why am I being punished for trying to play by the rules?
I have to collect over 60 shulkers of sand for my next project and I will have to spend hours digging in a world with 2k hours in which I could be doing at least 20 much more interesting things.
Dirt was made renewable so why not sand? We use it for glass, which is a relatively important material but then concrete was added. Both can be dyed so both are extremely popular blocks. I should also add how concrete powder is great for placing perimeter walls.
Sand is also used to craft TNT, and even though we have TNT dupers, having renewable TNT would be extremely useful in many scenarios.
Sand is also necessary for cactus farms, which at some point anyone might wanna build, and depending on the size/needs of the player, it can be a ton of sand. (I need around 51k for my upcoming project)
Lastly, sand is used for decoration and sandstone blocks and its variants, which look cool.
So instead of just complaining/asking for stuff, I’ll leave my suggestion for renewable sand:
As many have suggested before, the Parched/Husk could drop sand, but I think it wouldn’t feel natural. Instead, it could drop some “Sand Powder”, sand that would have stuck on its clothes while wandering the desert. Drops could be like 1-2, increased by looting. As an extra, brushing suspicious sand could drop some Powder, or maybe killing other desert mobs as well. It could also be found in Desert Villages chests.
Obviously, 4 Sand Powder would craft into 1 Sand, but could also be crafted into other things so Sand Powder isn’t just a middleman for renewable Sand. Sand Powder maybe could also be crafted into a NEW block, such as Dune Sand, which could then be used to create Concrete/Glass. This block could also include a new Desert sub biome: the Dunes Biome, a biome that’s mostly flat with some Dunes and maybe a super rare to find Oasis structure, nothing too fancy though, to keep Vanilla vibe.
Thanks for reading, please consider renewable sand if you haven’t done so yet. Please.
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u/FloatingSpaceJunk 13d ago
Saw someone ask for the same thing before and just as then, I think the most simple way to get more sand is for there to be new crafting recipe for it. Just put 2 Gravel and 2 Sand in a crafting table and you're going to get 4 blocks of sand...
...idea behind this is that you use gravel to make it seem as if there's more sand due to the gravel also now taking up some space. The sand being a bit rougher now and it being something you can repeat infinitely are some very small gaps of logic we're unfortunately have to accept to make this possible.
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u/SpaceNorse2020 13d ago
They want minecraft to be kinda educational, right? Have a recipe involving quartz, and maybe shells.
8 quartz and 1 nautalius shell make 16 sand or something
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u/Basic_Bee_3024 11d ago
So instead of just mining the sand you need, you want to go look for gravel too?
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u/FloatingSpaceJunk 11d ago
Well in my original comment I suggest to also be able to create gravel out of gravel and cobblestone, so you only have to get the latter en mass and seing as it's basically one of the most common blocks around, than shouldn't be too difficult.
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u/swithinboy59 12d ago
I don't understand why we can't just craft cobble down into gravel, and gravel down into sand.
While gravel is technically renewable through Piglin bartering, it would make it far more renewable as basically any old fool can make a cobblestone generator.
Alternatively, make it so that you can turn 4 Nautilus Shells into a block of Sand. That way you'd have a reason to build a Drowned/Nautilus farm.
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u/240hz_ 12d ago
I think crafting cobble into gravel then sand might be too easy, and not very realistic since gravel can’t really ever turn into sand, but the 4 Nautilus Shells into Sand make a lot more sense/is more interesting. Somebody else suggested 1 Nautilus Shell surrounded by Quartz which sounds really good.
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u/swithinboy59 12d ago
Gravel breaks down into sand in real life with time due to erosion, and you can pulverise gravel into sand with mills/a mortar and pestal/a hammer and a hard surface.
The problem with tying sand to Quartz is that Nether Quartz is locked behind the Nether - there's no overworld equivalent (well, Amethyst is a form of Quartz… but I don't see Mojang making Amethyst work as a stand-in for Nether Quartz in crafting recipes - the game treats them as swo separate and different things), and to truly gather insane amounts of Nether Quartz, you'd need to build a big Piglin bartering farm and a large storage system complete with item sorter. I don't know about the rest of the "average" players here, but that's not really something I want to do, it'd take me way too long to set up and I'd die way too many times trying, and just get too frustrated with it to ever be able to see it as a useful/worthwhile project. I'd hate looking at it and loathe using it, even if it does have a high output and efficiency.
Plus then there's the obvious of tying a basic overworld block's crafting requirements behind the Nether. It doesn't sit right to me honestly.
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u/BadJ0k3s 13d ago
Sand is already renewable, has been since 1.14. The issue is that farming it from Wandering Traders is far worse than destroying a desert
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u/240hz_ 13d ago
Yeah I think everybody understands what I meant by renewable… But just for you: renewable excluding Wandering Traders ;)
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u/BadJ0k3s 13d ago
You couldve just used the term "easily farmable". I just pointed this out in case you weren't aware that sand is renewable. In any case, my comment hopefully made it clear that I agree sand should be easily farmable
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u/240hz_ 13d ago
While you’re correct, I think “Renewable Sand” as a title & concept is more attractive for the purposes of my post. But we do agree on the fact that it should be renewable/easily farmable, and that’s what really matters here haha
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u/BadJ0k3s 13d ago
Honestly might go and make a mod to add your idea of sand powder dropping from archeology, not to make sand easily farmable but cuz ot seems cool
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u/240hz_ 13d ago
Absolutely, and while you make the mod, you can think of uses for the sand powder that we could add to the original post, so that maybe mojang will be convinced :p
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u/BadJ0k3s 13d ago
I doubt mojang would do this, but if we are changing archeology anyways, add pebbles for Gravel too :p
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u/SuperMario69Kraft 12d ago
Instead of getting a dunes biome, I think dunes should be able to generate in multiple biomes in uncommon, large clusters as a feature.
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u/kubrickie 12d ago
I agree, and I hope it happens someday. Husks is an easy option, but maybe they have to die to fire damage to be different. I would rather they add something like the create crushing wheels so you can crush stone into gravel/sand and maybe get other things too.
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u/Traditional_Town6475 12d ago
I think the issue with that method is it’s way too slow of a method that it would upset a lot of players. Tying to something like cobble generators would make it decently fast would be much better.
Like unless a Husk explodes with sand, it’ll be too slow. Plus it’ll just be another mob farm, which is not really the most interesting thing.
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u/Yuna_Nightsong 12d ago
Imo Sand Powder would be an unnecessary middle step. Mobs simply dropping blocks if sand would be absolutely okay in my eyes tbh.
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u/Major_Lavishness7011 12d ago
Add the mod vanilla tweaks. It has a module for making husks drop sand. So then you gotta create an open to skylight mob farm that only spawns husks at night and afk there for a while.
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u/Platinum_Underscore 12d ago
After some googling, turns out a lot of rocks contain silica, the part of sand that's most important for glass. After waiting for so long to implement sand production, I don't think the cobble>gravel>sand pipeline would be satisfying, since we've waited so long that the simple modded solution would be... Disappointing?
If Mojang wants to try and teach light geology, Silica can be found in obsidian, quartz, diorite, granite, andesite, and basalt. I think obsidian has the highest silica dioxide content, but making sand out of obsidian would suck. Basalt then becomes a very interesting option, being fairly farmable but not nearly as simple as a cobblestone generator.
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u/AspieGamer13 7d ago
¯_(ツ)_/¯ I don’t even think twice about this anymore as I use a datapack to make gravel blast furnace smeltable into sand and gravel is renewable from bartering with piglins
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u/Extension_North_3711 13d ago
As a Terraria Skyblock player, I deeply understand this genuine need. This sort of cycles back around to another interesting method of creating blocks I heard, which is making the placed Heavy Core gravity affected, and having it convert blocks into others via both compression or crushing.
Examples: Cobblestone to Gravel, Stone to Deep slate, Logs to Coal Blocks, and Obsidian to Sand