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 block, and markedly less than wood or stone.

Sandstone generates together to create desert wells in deserts. They are 5x5 and have a 3x3 plus sign of water in the center, useful for obtaining water, although deserts have lakes in them.

History
Sandstone was added in Minecraft Beta 1.2. As of Beta 1.3, Sandstone is now found below three blocks of naturally generated sand. Additionally, Sandstone slabs crafted from Sandstone was added in the same update.

Sandstone did not occur naturally in chunks generated in Beta 1.8. This issue was resolved in Beta 1.8.1.

Trivia

 * The top of the sandstone block is an edited version of sand.
 * There are 2-5 textures added in 1.2 Preview which appear to be for sandstone hieroglyph blocks.
 * The first hieroglyph block texture has four images, which, in order from left to right, seem to represent a Human, a creeper face, an eye and a footprint.