Blocks are the basic units of structure in Minecraft, and are essential to the gameplay. Together, they build up the in-game environment, and can be mined and utilized in various fashions. There are one hundred and fifty three different blocks as of version 1.5.1.
The face of a block is 16×16 pixels by default, but a player can implement a texture pack in order to make the game more detailed, with faces becoming 32x32, 64x64, 128x128, 256x256, or 512x512 pixels. No matter what the texture pack, however, each block is proportionately one cubic meter.[1] Most blocks are static, althoughwater, lava, portal, and fire blocks have a shifting pattern for each face.