terraria
Do Ash Blocks absorb water, or is that just me? Or is it because of the Underworld?
I was in the Underworld trying to prepare a small pool of water to dump lava into, but the ash block seemed to absorb the water I poured on it.
I guess that's the Water Evaporation effect of the Underworld?
Even though water somehow got deeper than where I am and managed to not evaporate?
Does water only evaporate in the Underworld when touching Ash?
Find a place where below you there's a lot of ground (ash) and hellstone (no buildings or anything where the imps can spawn on). Dig a tunnel (width 2) under you (block fireballs with a fast pickaxe) and mine until there are no visible places to spawn for imps, other than your own tunnel (which you can even fill with dirt).
Then it's easy to mine hellstone while blocking the fireballs of the few imps with your pickaxe (always face the enemy while mining). There won't be many imps since they don't have much space to spawn.
A stack of potions, magic mirror and any flail (for worms) should then be enough.
(I think the tunnel in the image is too wide, but hopefully this still makes it more clear)
From the 1.0.5 change log
Mud and ash now have a chance to fall like sand when struck.
Playing with it currently I seem to get a mud slide about 1 in 4 mud blocks dug, as the chance is presumably calculated for all neighbouring blocks the actual chance per block is likely lower
As for mining, make a ceiling out of stone or dirt and dig under it, digging down should be easy, be careful when digging sideways to dig at your farthest reach.
for mud you can also plant jungle/mushrooms in it which seems to prevent the falling chance, this would be quite situational as normally if you are tunnelling through it you will be removing the grass/fungi too
EDIT
from the 1.0.6 changelog
Ash and Mud no longer fall due to gravity.
so ash/mud physics is now of interest only as an historic note (unless it comes back again)
Best Answer
All water evaporates in the Underworld. However, due to the often laggy nature of big bodies of water, sometimes you can glitch a puddle into the Underworld without it evaporating. However, once it settles, if you mine a block from the bottom of that puddle, it will begin to evaporate.