Block of the Month: Glass

Calling all Minecrafters! The day has come, and it is time to continue our blog series called Block of the Month. This month we decided to take a look at the most fragile block of them all, which of course is the Glass block.

What would Minecraft be without a glass block? It would be claustrophobic as you would not be able to put windows on your house, and it would be boring as you would not be able to put a glass floor in your Minecraft nightclub.

Just like with all the other blocks in Minecraft, the creative possibilites are endless, and you can build anything you can think of with the glass block. Personally, if I could find the time, I would build the Louvre.

Finding & Mining

The glass block can be found naturally in a secret room inside the woodland mansions, but it can also be generated in ancient cities. Also, you can find Magenta stained glass blocks naturally generated in End cities.

Once you have located either of these locations, do not start mining the glass blocks immediately, as they will not drop itself without the proper tools. For it to actually drop, you would need to enchant your tool with Silk Touch.

With a Silk Touch enchanted tool at hand, you can start hitting the glass blocks and collect the loot as you go. Glass blocks are quite fragile and therefor easy to mine. The time it takes to break one block is 0.45 seconds, so you will collect plenty of glass blocks in no time.

Besides mining for glass blocks, you can also trade for them. Just find a Journey-man level librarian villager, and you will be able to initiate a trade. For the price of 1 emerald, you have a chance of ²⁄₃ to receive 4 glass blocks.

However, the most common way of procuring some glass blocks is from smelting sand. Finding sand is not hard at all, as it can easily be found in the Overworld.

Usage

So, what can glass blocks be used for? Let us start by stating the obvious. The glass block is a transparent solid block with four corners on each side. It can of course be used to make windows for your house.

As the default glass pane is just transparent and somewhat boring, you might want to change the color to something more eye catching. For this crafting process, you will need 8 glass blocks and 1 color dye. Place the 8 glass blocks around the edge of the crafting grid, leaving the center grid for the color dye.

That is it, if done successfully you will have crafted 8 stained glass blocks with a color of your choice. Now you can repeat the previous glass pane crafting process to craft stained glass panes.

Another fun fact about Glass is that mobs, such as Creepers, cannot see you through the glass. This is quite hilarious, but also very useful if you are being chased by a mob. Simply hide behind a glass block and the mob will lose sight of you.

Conclusion

Well, you have reached the end of this month’s installment of The block of the Month. One should always strive to learn something new each day, and hopefully that is exactly what you have done by reading this blog post.

The glass block can be used for so much more than what we have covered in this blog post. But, to keep the length of this blog post down to a somewhat readable level, we could not cover it all. For example, glass blocks are an integral part of creating a Beacon, but that is for another blog post.

Have a nice day and take care!