Stone Bricks

Stone Brick is a new block type that was implemented in the 1.8 Beta update. Stone Bricks are one of the materials that are used in the Strongholds.

In the Beta stages of the game, Stone brick that the player crafts appeared to have a very small chance of having the object change to Cracked Stone Brick or Mossy Stone Brick when harvested. The same phenomenon also happened with harvested Stone Brick Stairs. This was a glitch that has been fixed.

Crafting
Stone Bricks can be crafted by placing 4 Stone blocks in a square, meaning they can be crafted without a Crafting Table.

Trivia

 * In Beta 1.7, the file "en_US.lang" contained a reference to this block as "tile.stonebricksmooth.name=Stone Bricks", giving the first confirmation of their name.
 * The insect mob known as Silverfish spawn from blocks identical in appearance to Stone Bricks.
 * You can also mine another type of a "Normal" Stone Brick (Neither Mossy nor Cracked), if you mine it from the Stone Brick Stairs.
 * Stone Bricks that are "crafted" by breaking a Stone Brick Stair that was placed when facing South (F=3) are not stackable with Stone Bricks that have been crafted from Stone or obtained by destroying a Stone Brick Stair in East (F=2) direction. There doesn't seem to be a visual difference at this time, though.
 * Stone bricks have about the same blast resistance as Brick; a TNT block surrounded by either of these will only destroy one block in each direction.
 * Cracked, mossy, and regular stone bricks all have the same blast resistance.
 * The texture for the bricks may be inspired from the Castle wallpaper found in the files of Microsoft's abandoned Nashville project.

Bugs
This is a bug that has been fixed and no longer works.

With Stone Brick Stairs, it was possible to mine three different types of blocks depending on the direction you are facing while placing them: This is due to the stairs' damage value (representing the direction it's facing) being reused in the dropped block's damage value (representing the type of stone brick, see Data values).

When using the vanilla texture pack, the lines on stone bricks that (theoretically) should make up smaller bricks do not continue correctly on all directions, including top and bottom.