Sand Block

Sand falls the moment nothing holds it up, and it hurts whatever it lands on. Bury yourself under enough of it and you take Suffocation until you dig out, which is how sand kills more players than anything living in a desert. Only a short list of blocks behaves this way, slush, silt and shell piles among them, plus ash in a couple of special seeds. One of the game's loading tips claims sand is overpowered, and it is only half a joke.

Because a column collapses the instant you take its base out, gathering sand is mostly standing in the right place and holding the button. Break the bottom block, the tower drops onto you, and you collect the lot. Placing a torch beneath the column or actuating the bottom row is faster still. There is a ceiling: falling sand counts as projectiles, and the world can only hold so many at once, so collapsing an entire dune in one go loses the excess.

For real volume the Digging Molecart does it in one pass. Lay track into a dune, ride it, and mine sideways as you travel; the cart places track before the sand can land, so it drops as items instead of settling. You take some chip damage, and you have to clear any solid blocks propping the sand up ahead of you, since the molecart will not mine sand itself.

Sand only obeys Block Swap properly with a pickaxe of at least cobalt tier. Below that you can swap the top block of a column and nothing under it. Any pickaxe at all can swap sand for another gravity block.

That behavior makes it a construction material in a way stone is not. Dropping sand down a shaft ahead of you lines the walls before you commit to the descent, and it is the standard way to wall off lava while cutting a hellevator. It builds simple crushing traps too, for enemies or for other players.

Most of what you gather ends up as Glass, which opens a full furniture line and a pile of unrelated recipes. If you have far more than you need, glass is also how you convert it into money, either as ale or as glass candelabras once you have the torches to go with them.

It is also ammunition for the Sandgun, though it will not sit in the ammo slots and has to ride in your inventory. Fired sand lands as a block wherever there is room, so with enough ammo conservation from armor, an Ammo Reservation Potion or an ammo box, the gun places more sand than it spends and quietly farms itself.

Deserts are made of it, oceans keep it on the shore and the seabed, and pockets of it show up underground. Antlion fire it at you as a projectile, which is free material if you are patient. The evil biomes and the Hallow convert it to their own versions, which fall the same way and smelt into glass just the same. Dunerider Boots run faster across any of it.

Skyblock is the seed that makes sand precious, since there is no desert to strip. The most reliable route is shimmering magic mirrors from cavern mimics into glass and then into sand. Beyond that you can float sand on an ocean and let shells and starfish grow on it for shell piles, run obsidian or shell piles through an extractinator, or farm the antlion projectiles. Decrafting bottles out of slime potions technically works and is not worth the hours.