Smooth Stone

Smooth Stone is stone smelted a second time. Cobblestone goes into a furnace and comes out as stone; put that stone back in and it comes out smooth — an even grey with none of the speckling of the block it started as, which is why builders reach for it whenever a floor or a wall needs to read as flat rather than rocky.

It also behaves better than the stone it came from. Plain stone drops cobblestone when mined, but Smooth Stone drops itself, so a floor can be taken up and relaid somewhere else without re-smelting a thing — provided you use a pickaxe, since any other tool leaves nothing behind at all.

Its slab is the shape most builds actually want, and it is an oddity: the top face keeps the smooth texture while the sides show a banded edge, a detail that reads as a finished surface and turns up in half the interiors you will see. There are no smooth stone stairs or walls in the game, so grey staircases fall back on stone or polished andesite, and smooth stone bricks do not exist either despite how often the name is searched for.

Because every block costs two passes through a furnace, bulk quantities come from setup rather than mining: a cobblestone generator feeding a bank of furnaces, then a stonecutter turning the results straight into slabs one block at a time. Fuel is the real price — everything in a Smooth Stone build has been burned twice.