Grass Block

Grass is a block that was introduced in the game very early. It uses 3 textures, a green one for the top, one borrowed from the Dirt block for bottom and a edited Dirt texture with grass on the top edge on all the sides. Grass appears on the topmost blocks of the dirt layer of a natural map. Grass' main notability is spreading through Dirt blocks that receive light.

Grass cannot be directly placed in Creative mode, but can still be put where a player desires nonetheless; making a dirt trail to the area desired will cause Grass to spread over and change any Dirt block it can into Grass. Grass can be used to make lawns, gardens or as a shade of green in Pixel Art that is on the ground. Attempting to place Grass blocks by means of hacking one's inventory in Multiplayer will cause the server to automatically kick the player. Due to current Creative mode's lack of dynamic lighting, Grass that is in shadow will die and change to Dirt.

In Alpha Survival Mode, dynamic lighting allowed Grass to live and spread in partial darkness. Grass takes a short amount of time to mine by hand, but a Shovel will quicken the process if a large amount of Grass needs to be dug out. When mined, Grass drops a Dirt block. Tilling Grass with a Hoe will occasionally drop Seeds, unlike Dirt. Using the new "/give" command in Survival Multiplayer, Grass tiles can safely be directly placed. The block features the side face on all sides of the block before being placed; most likely due to the way blocks are handled as resources.

In Survival Mode Test, Sheep would eat Grass (to regrow Cloth on their bodies), reverting it to Dirt. Often, the Grass would regrow just as quickly as Sheep would eat it.

Grass will not grow on Slow Sand, even though Slow Sand has much the same properties as dirt.

In the Halloween Update, grass now has a randomly varying hue. However, the grass at the sides of the block seem to not change hue.

For information about how grass spreads, see the grass growing guide below.

Trivia

 * Grass and dirt changing between each other is a common cause of chunk updates.
 * Grass is one of the first seen blocks made in Minecraft, seen here. It had the top most face on all sides, resulting in "grass cubes".
 * A grass block has become the favicon for Minecraft.net and the icon for Minecraft.exe.
 * In Indev, placable grass blocks were stored in chests for a short time, and when placed, no matter where, the grass would never die. The only way to kill the grass was to mine the block.