Sponge

A sponge is a block that can be placed to remove water in an area around itself. This turns it into a wet sponge, which can be smelted or placed in the Nether to dry it to be reused. Sponges can only be found in ocean monuments.

Breaking

Either type of sponge can be mined by hand, or with any tool, dropping itself as an item; however, hoes break sponges the fastest compared to other tools.

Natural generation

Ocean monuments can have "sponge rooms". Each room contains an average of 30 wet sponges. See Ocean Monument/Structure for details.

Drying

A wet sponge placed in the Nether dries out instantly with a puff of steam and turns into a normal sponge. , a wet sponge placed in any dry biome in the Overworld dries out after a few minutes and turns into a normal sponge. If a normal sponge sucks up water in a dry biome, it immediately dries out with a puff of steam.

Smelting

A wet sponge can be dried in a furnace, making the sponge reusable.

Water absorption

A sponge can be used to turn water into air by "absorbing" the water. A sponge instantly absorbs nearby water when it is placed next to water or when water comes into contact with it. Sponges immediately turn wet upon absorption and do not absorb any more water afterward. Wet sponges drip small water particles. Sponges in item form do not absorb water or become wet. A sponge absorbs both flowing and source blocks of water up to 6 blocks away (taken as a taxicab distance) in all six directions around itself. Instead of a cube or a sphere, this effectively encloses the volume of an with vertices placed 4 units away from the center in each direction due to the game's extensive use of taxicab distance. A sponge does not absorb more than 118 blocks of water however, and water closest to the sponge is absorbed first. The absorption propagates only between adjacent water blocks and does not "jump over" non-water blocks, including air.

Screenshots

Picture of Sponge.png|An example of sponges keeping an area dry in Java Edition Classic. HidingSponge1.png|Hidden sponge in the corner of a wood-paneled room, in Java Edition Classic. SpongeInvAdvUpd.png|Sponges in the Creative inventory in the Adventure Update. WetVsDrySponge.png|A sponge next to a wet sponge. Beta sponge.png|The old sponge and gravel textures. Glassclassic.jpg|First picture of sponge in the test version of 0.0.18a_02. Sponges Drying.png|Sponges drying . Jeb Sponges.jpg|Image of sponges from Jeb's instagram.