How to Get Grass Blocks in Minecraft Without Getting Dirt

Mine it with a Silk Touch tool. That’s the only way to break a grass block and keep it as grass; anything else drops plain dirt. Without Silk Touch, you can kill an enderman that’s carrying a grass block, or place dirt next to existing grass and let the grass spread onto it, which is how most players cover large areas anyway.

This page is about the full grass block. If you want the short grass plant that grows on top of it, use shears.

Silk Touch

Any tool with Silk Touch drops the grass block itself. Your bare hand still gets dirt, so you need an enchanted tool. A shovel is the obvious choice, since it breaks dirt-type blocks fastest, and the same shovel also keeps mycelium, podzol and dirt paths intact.

Silk Touch comes from an enchanting table or an enchanted book applied on an anvil. Librarian villagers sell the book too.

Snowy grass blocks are the exception. Silk Touch on one gives you an ordinary grass block, and there’s no survival way to hold the snowy version in your inventory.

Taking it from an enderman

Endermen pick up certain blocks, grass blocks included, and carry them around. If you kill one that’s holding grass, it drops the grass block. This is the only survival method that doesn’t need Silk Touch, but it’s luck-dependent: you need to spot an enderman carrying grass and then win the fight without it teleporting off with your prize. Plains and forests at night are where you’ll see the most endermen holding grass.

Letting grass spread

You rarely need to carry a whole stack of grass. Grass spreads to dirt on its own, so one block of grass (or a nearby field) can cover a whole base. The rules are the same on Java and Bedrock:

• The grass block doing the spreading needs light level 9 or higher directly above it. Torches, daylight, anything works.
• The dirt can be up to 1 block away horizontally, and from 3 blocks below to 1 block above the grass.
• The block above the dirt has to let light through. Glass, torches and fences are fine; a full solid block isn’t, and water or lava on top stops it as well.
• It works on regular dirt only. Coarse dirt and rooted dirt never turn into grass.

Spreading happens on random ticks, so it isn’t instant. A patch can take a few minutes to fill in, and grass creeps downhill faster than uphill. If you’re landscaping a big area, put down dirt in rows touching the existing grass and keep it lit; it’ll green over while you build something else.

Why your grass keeps turning into dirt

Grass dies back to dirt if a full opaque block sits on it, or if something lowers the light above it to 4 or less. Sheep also eat grass and leave dirt behind, which is why sheep pens turn brown. A hoe turns grass into farmland and a shovel turns it into a dirt path; neither gives the grass block back.

If you’re starting a farm, you don’t need grass at all. Crops grow on farmland made from either dirt or grass.

Creative and commands

Creative mode has grass blocks in the inventory, and /give @s grass_block works in any world with cheats on. Grass blocks can’t be crafted and no villager or wandering trader sells them.

For builders, a Silk Touch shovel plus the spreading trick covers almost every case. Carry a few blocks of real grass as “seeds” to new areas, put dirt around them, and light the place up.