Block of the Month: Polished granite

This beautiful block first appeared in the Bountiful Update, released in September 2014, alongside such joys as prismarine, slime blocks, banners, rabbits, and armor stands. It hasn’t changed much since then (why mess with perfection?), but it did get a light texture update in 2019.

As well as crafting, there are other ways to get polished granite. You can trade for it with Mason villagers (one emerald will get you four blocks), you can churn it out in vast quantities by automating a stonecutter with some redstone and hoppers, or you can dig it out of ocean ruins – where it’s often used to add a decorative touch.

That’s a clue to what you use it for – polished granite is a decorative block that you can use to make your builds look fancy. It comes in slab and stair variants, and you can also use it to craft a stonecutter. It has the same blast resistance as regular stone, so you won’t gain any functional benefits there, but gosh does it look nicer.

Polishing stone is common in the real world, to make it look nicer, but as hinted above it takes a whole lot more work than it does in Minecraft. It dates way back, at least to ancient Egyptian times, when sand was used to make the surfaces of statues and monuments shinier. 

Despite my dodgy joke in the introduction, polishing doesn’t actually have anything to do with Poland. The word comes from the Latin word “polire”, which means “to make smooth, decorate, or embellish”, and perhaps from the proto-Indo-European root *pel-, which means “to thrust, drive or strike”. Poland’s name, on the other hand, comes from the Slavonic word “polje”, meaning “field”.

Wherever it comes from, polished stone can be found all over the place in the modern world – and granite is a common choice. You’ll see it on the walls and floors of fancy buildings like hotels, but it’s also common as a surface in luxurious kitchens – because it’s waterproof, tough, easy to clean, and most importantly of all, really quite pretty. Just like me!