Sandstone

Sandstone is a solid block. It can both be found naturally at the bottom of sand stacks and crafted with 4 blocks of sand in a square, and thus does not require the use of a crafting table.

Function and behavior
Unlike sand, sandstone is unaffected by gravity and will not fall if placed without a supporting block. Sandstone occurs naturally beneath the bottom layers of sandy areas to ensure that it does not start out floating. However, if a lake occurs in that space, it may carve away the sandstone and result in unsupported sand. Sandstone's unique style allows for desert-themed architecture. It can be readily obtained in order to build a shelter and survive the first night in Survival when you spawn in a desert biome though bear in mind one must mine four blocks of sand to compress into a single block of sandstone. Placed sandstone can be harvested with any pickaxe. Breaking a sandstone block by hand destroys the block but drops no resources; it takes slightly longer to mine it with bare hands than wood.

Sandstone can also be crafted into a sandstone slab. Due to slabs currently being represented by damage values on a single block, sandstone slabs (like the wooden slab) behaves as if it were stone, resulting in it taking longer to mine and having a much greater blast resistance. Sandstone's blast resistance is otherwise similar to sand or grass, and markedly less than wood or stone.

Sandstone used to take a very long time to mine using a pickaxe. Even using a diamond pickaxe, the only block that took longer to break was obsidian. This was fixed in a later patch.

History
Sandstone was added in Minecraft Beta 1.2.

In Beta 1.3:
 * Sandstone can now be used to craft a sandstone slab.
 * Sandstone is now found at the bottom of naturally generated sand.

Sandstone does not occur naturally in chunks generated in Beta 1.8.0. In 1.8.1 this issue was resolved.