Diorite doesn’t have a whole lot of uses in Minecraft, except for decoration. There’s a nice polished variant which makes beautiful flooring, that you’ll get by putting four blocks of the raw stuff in a 2x2 crafting grid. You can also use it to make andesite and granite, and in Bedrock edition it can be used in place of stone to make slabs and redstone comparators.

As a building material, diorite is pretty great. It has the same blast resistance as stone, so Creepers and your sneaky multiplayer pals won’t do much damage to anything you construct out of it. Plus, it’s arguably the white-coloured material that’s easiest to get large quantities of, so if you want white as a colour in your next build then it’s a great option to look at.

As we discussed in the andesite block of the week, real-world diorite and andesite are kinda like rock brothers. They both form when magma cools down - but diorite is made when that happens inside the earth, while andesite is created when it flows out into the open air as lava.