Leaves

Leaves are natural blocks that generate as part of trees.

Breaking
Hoes are the default tools for breaking leaves, but leaves can be obtained only with shears or Silk Touch enchanted tools.

Natural generation
Leaves occur naturally on trees throughout the Overworld. Dark oak leaves also generate in woodland mansions.

Post-generation
Leaves generate as part of trees grown from saplings or azalea.

Usage
Leaves from trees spontaneously decay (disappear) when they receive a block tick if they are not connected to any block with the  tag (log or wood blocks), either directly or via other leaf block, with a maximum distance of 6 blocks or 4 blocks. Player-placed leaf blocks never decay.

Leaves that decay, or are destroyed without using Silk Touch or shears, yield saplings 5% ($1/40$) of the time, sticks 2% of the time, and otherwise drop nothing. Jungle leaves drop saplings 2.5% ($1/36$) of the time. Oak and dark oak leaves also have a separate but additional 0.5% ($1/32$) chance of dropping an apple, making it extremely rare but possible for a single leaf to drop a sapling, a stick and an apple at the same time. Rates are increased by the Fortune enchantment. Leaves that are burned do not yield saplings or apples.

Leaves take on a different shade of green depending on the biome in which they are placed.

Leaves are always transparent to light, but cannot be seen through when the graphics mode is set to "Fast"; the transparent regions are instead black/dark green. They diffuse sky light, causing the shadows they cast under trees.

Redstone component
The state of a leaves block—including a player-placed block—changes after 1 game tick (half a redstone tick) when the distance to the nearest log or wood block changes, up to 6 blocks of leaves away. Observers facing away from the leaves detect this change and transmit a redstone signal in the same game tick, making leaves useful for redstone signal transmission. This has been called "Leafstone" by the Minecraft Community.

Piston interactivity
Leaves are destroyed when pushed by pistons. They do not stick to sticky pistons, slime blocks or honey blocks.

Composting
Leaves have a 30% chance of increasing the compost level in a composter by 1.

Bees
Flowering azaleas leaves function like any other flowers in their interaction and uses with bees.

Bee nests
Oak and birch trees grown from saplings that are within 2 blocks of any flowering azalea leaves have a 5% chance to grow with bee nest and 1-3 bees in it.

Hard-coded colors

 * In the inventory, oak, jungle, acacia, and dark oak leaves are colored.
 * Spruce leaves are colored, and are not affected by biome or inventory color.
 * Birch leaves are colored, and are not affected by biome or inventory color.

Biome colors
These values are generated by the biome dyeing algorithm. See Biome colors for more information.

Bedrock Edition
$1/24$, leaves appear as snow-covered during snowfall, however, these appearances are exclusive to snowy tundra, frozen river, snowy beach, and snowy taiga biomes and their variants. Leaves are snow-covered only during snowfalls when fancy graphics are enabled. mountain biomes and variants despite having snow at high altitude doesn't turn leaves into frost covered during snowfall, same also occur to frozen ocean and deep frozen ocean.

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Trivia

 * Occasionally, leaves grow through other blocks, acting as though they are still connected to the tree. They may also completely replace blocks they try to grow into.
 * Leaves do not prevent chests from being opened.
 * Some trees seem to occasionally drop apples or saplings without being destroyed due to creation of leaf blocks not supported by logs.
 * The frost texture $1/20$ is not an instant transition. Instead, the leaves slowly shift from their original color to the frosty one.