Material Reducer

The material reducer is a block used in chemistry to learn about the natural world, by reducing Minecraft blocks to their component elements.

Obtaining
Material reducers cannot be obtained in Survival without commands. $$, the world must also have “Education Edition” enabled.

From block loot
A material reducer can be mined with a pickaxe. Mining without a pickaxe is slow, but the material reducer still drops as an item.

Info
Using the material reducer opens an interface of 10 inventory slots. The central slot at the top is the input, where blocks can be placed in order to break them down into their component parts. When this happens, the output slots fill up with the percentage of elements found in the broken down material.

Certain blocks such as soul sand and netherrack contain mysterious elements yet to be discovered. These are represented by an unknown element that displays as other elements, but with a question mark in place of a periodic table symbol.

When an element is taken from one of the output slots, the input slot gets cleared, and if there are elements in other output slots, the input slot becomes red and does not accept further input until all of the outputs are cleared.

With the exception of dirt (which gives only 60 atoms), any block broken down in the material reducer gives 100 atoms.

Breaking
A material reducer can be mined with a pickaxe. Mining without a pickaxe is slow, but the material reducer still drops as an item.

Trivia

 * There is currently a glitch in the material reducer's GUI: When the input slot becomes red, the "tubes" that are connected to it are sometimes rendered over the red square, which will cause the image to flick between the normal square and the tubes.