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Nether Star
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Note: item

Slow sand (aka Mud, Hell mud or Soul sand) is a brown-grey dirt-type block, found in The Nether. This material has looks somewhat similar to a Dirt block, but it has some unique features. It slows the movement of any player or mob, and players sink slightly into the block while walking on it. This effect is much greater when in water and could be useful for making drowning traps more effective against pigs. The slowing effect can also be used to fight large amounts of mobs at once, especially using a bow.

File:Oneway.jpg

A one-way passage. Players cannot pass through the side with the slow sand.

When placed on the ground in front of a two-block high ceiling, slow sand prevents players from moving under the ceiling, making it a useful one-way passage. Mobs do not seem to be affected, which limits usefulness.

This block also suppresses the impact from Boats when colliding to it. This makes it an effective building material when creating a dock.

It is commonly mistaken that the best tool for harvesting Slow sand is to be a shovel because harvesting it makes the same sound as dirt, gravel and sand. However, shovels make no effect in speeding up the process. Swords can harvest it slightly faster, but this costs two uses of the sword instead of one.

Trivia

  • The texture resembles a collage of faces. These faces look like those of Creepers.
  • The first appearance of this block was on Notch's blog.
  • There is currently a bug where falling off this block directly into lava or water you will move slower in said lava/water until you are back on normal land.
  • When first released, Sneaking on a slow sand block would not prevent the player from falling from the block. This bug was fixed in the 1.2.1 patch.


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