Stonecutter

Stonecutter converts one stone-family block into any of its cut shapes in a single step. Feed it cobblestone and it offers walls, stairs and slabs; feed it deepslate, blackstone, quartz, purpur or cut copper and it offers that family's shapes instead — no intermediate recipes, no crafting grid to remember.

The reason to use one is waste. Stairs cut on a Stonecutter come out at one per block, where a crafting table returns four stairs for every six blocks you put in, so a road, a staircase or a curtain wall costs noticeably less stone through the cutter. Slabs come out at two per block either way, so for those it is convenience rather than savings.

It is also a job site block. An unemployed villager who sleeps nearby will take up a Stonecutter and become a mason, whose trades run through stone, bricks and quartz, so a spare cutter in a village is a trading post as much as a workshop.

One quirk is edition-specific: in Bedrock Edition, standing on a Stonecutter damages you, so it belongs against a wall rather than in the middle of a walkway; in Java Edition it is an ordinary solid block. Either way it takes stone-family blocks only, so wood and wool shapes still belong on a crafting table, and a pickaxe is what breaks it quickly.