Bricks

Brick is a block first appearing in a version of Creative. The block has 1 texture that is put on all sides of the block. Brick blocks do not occur naturally on a generated map.

Brick is available for use in Creative mode. It is mostly used to make nice looking homes or fireplaces, as well as towers.

Clay's only usage is to be made into bricks or clay blocks, as breaking Clay drops 4 Clay Balls, which can then be smelted into Clay Bricks. This means that for each Clay block found in a map, players can make 1 Brick block. Due to the rarity of Clay, Brick is hard to gather in large quantities. Brick is a durable block and resists well to explosions. A Pickaxe must be used to recover the resource of a placed block. Breaking a block with the player's hand is slow and will not yield the resource. Since Brick is not flammable, it is often used to make Lava Fireplaces.

Crafting
In Beta mode, a Brick block can be crafted from 4 Clay Bricks in the pattern below:

Trivia

 * Brick originally appeared (and still does in Creative mode, Survival Test, Indev and Infdev) with a bright red texture. Upon being added in Alpha, the bricks in the texture were given a darker look.
 * Notch has said that there may be more kinds of brick blocks in different colors in the future.
 * For a brief time, huge brick pyramids were a rare structure that could spawn in an old Infdev version. See this video, this video and the end of this video to see the pyramids and exploration of them. The pyramids were completely solid; they had no inside rooms. A strange quality about these pyramids is that if one dug under it, a layer of dirt and stone extended under the pyramid. This suggests it spawned right on top of the terrain instead of being a complete pyramid with the bottom parts underground. Pyramids were removed before Alpha was released.
 * Bricks always take 3 seconds to destroy, no matter the pickaxe type.