Minecraft Wiki:Projects/Wiki videos/Stone

Stone, discounting air, is the most common block in Minecraft. It can be found underground in every biome in the Overworld, and sometimes even on the surface.

When mined with a pickaxe or destroyed by an explosion, it will drop cobblestone, which can be smelted back into stone inside a furnace and will result in 0.1 experience. Stone can also be obtained by mining it with a pickaxe enchanted with Silk Touch, eliminating the need for fuel. Attempting to mine the block without a pickaxe will break the block without dropping any items.

Stone can be used to craft various items, such as stone bricks, buttons, pressure plates, and of course its usual slabs and stairs. It can also be smelted into a decorative smooth variant and give 0.1 experience in the process.

If you don't feel like destroying your world to get stone, or have a glut of cobblestone but don't want to waste fuel nor time on converting it, you can make a stone generator by dropping lava on top of flowing water, which will create infinite amounts of stone. It then can be obtained with a Silk Touch pickaxe as mentioned before.

While stone is generally a good, if bland, material for construction due to being rather tough to break, and resisting creeper and TNT explosions and outright blocking ghast fireballs, the block does fall into a small subclass of blocks which can become infested by silverfish. When infested, the block will break when another silverfish nearby is damaged and will spawn a silverfish when mined, so building with stone should be done with caution in strongholds or mountainous biomes. However, if you have some time on hand, you can cheat the system by building out of stacked stone slabs instead. Double stone slabs look completely identical to a full stone block, but cannot be infested at all, allowing you to maintain the look of this block at no extra cost to you besides time and inventory space.