A couple of recipes were added in today’s 1.8 snapshot, so I added them to our server ahead of time. Using a combination of gravel and dirt, you can now craft “coarse dirt”, which is the dirt where grass cannot grow. You can also bake stone brick to make cracked stone brick.

To facilitate coarse dirt, I also made it drop itself when you break it. This means you can also get coarse dirt from mega taiga biomes, where this stuff naturally generates. There does not appear to be a way to make coarse dirt back into regular dirt in the snapshot, so be careful for now. All coarse dirt will get the new coarse dirt texture when we update to 1.8 in the future.