Obsidian

Obsidian is a deep purple block that was first released into that game at version 0.30. Obsidian may be found on rare occasion, when there is flowing Water and still Lava nearby.

Obsidian is available for use in Creative mode. It is generally used for making dark things, or the black lines of pixel art. In Survival Test mode, Obsidian was extremely tough to break and would drop one or two Cobblestone blocks when busted. Obsidian was not available anywhere in Indev. Obsidian is created when flowing water hits a lava spring; when a water spring and a lava spring collide it creates cobblestone. The obsidian never actually spawns with the chunk, but is created by the environment. Obsidian can only be successfully mined with a diamond pickaxe, each block taking 15 seconds to break. It can be destroyed with a non-diamond pickaxe, but this takes 50 seconds and will not yield a collectable block. Obsidian can be destroyed by TNT although it will need to take a total of 6000 damage points done by TNT before breaking without dropping anything.

Obsidian in the wild is somewhat rare and difficult to mine since it usually rests on top of a Lava block. Obsidian farming is thus the preferred way to acquire large quantities. A basic Obsidian farm is composed of a trough seven blocks long into which seven blocks of Lava are poured using the Bucket. A water block is then placed on top of one end of the trough so that it flows onto the lava and converts it into Obsidian. If you prefer to mine obsidian in the wild bring a bucket of water along and place the water spring directly on top of the Obsidian block you are mining, most times the water will rush into the empty spot first and save the Obsidian from burning up in the lava.

As of the Halloween Update Obsidian can be used to create portals to The Nether. This requires at least 10 blocks of Obsidian (14 for a full frame) and Flint and Steel.

In the first version of Infdev, Obsidian was used to mark the positions of the cardinal directions. This created two intersecting planes extending just above the surface of the solid material that surrounds them. This has since been removed.

Notch has mentioned he may require floating islands to have obsidian in the future:

Later, when asked about making floating blocks fall, he answered:

Obsidian