Dirt

Dirt is a block that was introduced very early in the game. It has an identical texture located on all sides of the block. It is immensely abundant on normally generated maps, being the first few layers of blocks below Grass and 3 - 4 layers above Stone. When adjacent to a grass block and receiving sunlight, there is a chance that it can turn into Grass block itself.

Creative Mode
Dirt has always been a usable block in Creative mode since its addition to the game. Early in Minecraft when there was not many block types in the game yet, dirt was often used as a building material. Since then, more suitable blocks for making structures out of have been added, and dirt is mainly used only for altering the terrain of the map.

Alpha Mode
Dirt is easy to mine and often acquired in large amounts. Dirt will always drop a resource-block, no matter if hands or a tool is used to mine it. Dirt can be mined fairly quickly by hand, but using a shovel will speed up the process, considerably if large amounts of dirt are being excavated. It is not wise to build with as it is a very weak block and will be destroyed easily in explosions. Some players keep their Dirt blocks to use as foot-holds in caves and cliffs, while others dispose of or destroy it seeing it as useless and use other blocks as foot-holds.

Dirt cannot be crafted into anything, but using a Hoe on it will turn the Dirt block into a Farmland block.

Outdated Modes

 * Survival Test - Dirt behaves like it does in Creative. Sheep eating Grass causes it to turn into Dirt again. Dirt is destroyed in explosions.
 * Indev - Same as Alpha.
 * Infdev - Same as Alpha.

Trivia

 * Dirt is the second most common resource on a natural map, next to Stone.