minecraft-java-edition
When making mechanisms such as elevators based on sand/gravel blocks (and their property of being affected by gravity) how one can avoid those blocks from breaking?
I understand that if blocks bounce there's a higher chance of them breaking. So possibly another take at the question would be: what are the conditions for sand/gravel blocks to break into an item?
Rather than trying to do it in-game, you can use MCEdit to achieve the same effect. In MCedit, select an area of air and use the Fill & Replace tool to select sand. Save your world, and voila: floating sand.
Apparently, sand doesn't start falling until it's interacted with.
There's also a weird interaction between sand and torches, in that sand will float above a torch:
Minecraft physics is the best kind of physics.
It's weird that this only happens on single player, try these to see if they solve your problem
If your Render Distance is high and your computer is trying to load a mass amount of chunks then this could cause your PC to lag. You can also turn Particles to low, Graphics to fast, and Clouds off.
If you look in the Minecraft menu under Options then Video Settings You should see "Use VBOs" this is supposed to increase your FPS 5 to 10%
Read more on VBOs here.
Such as Mobs and other entities, snow, decaying leaves and more
you can find a whole list of things to remove here: What game mechanics in Minecraft cause lag?
The last thing you could do is install a lag reducing tool like OptiFine
There are plenty tutorials online on how to do this.
Best Answer
I believe I have determined the algorithm for sand and gravel falling; I previously wrote it up on Minecraft Wiki. I will use "sand" to refer to sand or gravel.
When sand is falling, it is an entity, just like all other freely moving objects. This entity falls under the influence of gravity until it hits something solid on its bottom. This causes an attempt to place a solid block at the cube-grid location containing the bottom-center point of the falling sand. Then, if that cube is occupied by a block (such as a slab or torch), the sand turns into a resource entity (the rotating cube you can pick up) instead.
So, just as conclusions from the above description, some other ways sand can break besides falling on torches:
In order to avoid breaking sand with piston mechanisms, don't push blocks into space sand is currently falling into.