Planks

Wooden planks are blocks that are not naturally found on maps; it has to be crafted by players. It appears as a series of interconnected planks. It is good for creating a support style for your buildings and also making huts and shacks. Wooden Planks may be burned in furnaces, creating 15 seconds of fire. Wooden Planks are a renewable resource, obtainable by breaking wood blocks and placing them into a crafting box in Beta. In Survival Test, they could be made simply by breaking wood blocks. It takes 43 planks to smelt a full stack of 64 items. It is easy to obtain, in biomes like forests.

There seems to be an unnamed block in the game's code that looks like wood, but takes the properties of a mob spawner, which disappears when it spawns a pig. This block can be found with Marglyph's Too Many Items ingame inventory editor.

Building
The value of building with wooden planks is disputed in Beta. Structures built of planks can be burned down easily, either by accident or by Griefers. It is often used, regardless of the dangers, for its abundance in trees and for certain sorts of buildings, such as Inns.



Crafting
Wooden planks are used in many crafting recipes: wooden axe, pickaxe, sword, shovel, and hoe; pressure plate, workbench, chest, bowl, sign, door, boat, stick, stairs, jukebox, bookshelf, Note block and Slab.

History
Wooden planks originally looked like this: when they were first made.

The older wooden plank texture looks more like a brick block.