Sand is a critical bulk resource for builders and redstoners, as an ingredient in concrete, glass, crafted sandstone, and TNT. While easy enough to acquire, mining it by hand can be monotonous, and large projects often result in the complete destruction of desert biomes, especially on servers. There is a clear demand for renewable sand. The question, then, is how to implement it.
My proposal is that the player should be able to acquire it by grinding down other renewable materials. For example, stone could be ground into cobblestone, cobblestone into gravel, gravel into sand, and sand into clay, perhaps. Sandstone, naturally, could also be ground down into sand, though this could be a wasteful process. Likewise, red sand could be ground from red sandstone, or from iron ore (red sand is red because of oxidized iron content), giving a use to mining iron ore for players with iron farms.
These recipes could be functionality added to the grindstone, automatable with hopper input and output, or it could be implemented through some new block, like a millstone, to keep the current and new functionalities separate. In either case, renewable sand would enable players to make large-scale builds without destroying deserts, and would provide an important step towards replacing TNT duping, which many technical players rely on for quarries, concrete converters, cobblestone farms, and wood farms.
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