What are petrified oak slabs in Minecraft?

Slabs can be made of all kinds of material in Minecraft: oak wood, birch wood, purpur, stone, brick, basalt, sandstone and even copper, thanks to the 1.17 update. Slabs are useful for a lot of different things in Minecraft, most notably for building and decoration. They can be placed on the top half of a block or the bottom half to provide some creativity with a build.

One kind of slab has long been forgotten: the petrified oak slab. There are slabs of each type of wood, ranging from oak to crimson, but petrified oak slabs are one that not many players have heard about. This begs the question: what are the petrified oak slabs in Minecraft?

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Minecraft: What is a petrified oak slab?

Petrified oak slabs were the stone-type wooden slabs that were in Minecraft before Java Edition 1.3.1. Unfortunately, there is no way to acquire them in vanilla Minecraft. Through the use of mods and other methods, they can be acquired, but not legitimately and in vanilla Minecraft.

The petrified oak slab had the same hardness level as stone, bricks, blackstone, mossy cobblestone, Nether bricks, purpur, smooth quartz, smooth sandstone, cut sandstone (and red sandstone), and smooth stone.

Petrified oak slabs had a slightly different color than oak slabs (Image via Minecraft)

When they were in the game, they would drop as petrified oak slabs when broken in Java Edition. This is the same as any slab, because when players break them they drop themselves. However, in Bedrock Edition, Minecraft players would receive oak slabs when they broke petrified oak slabs.

Petrified oak slabs had to be mined with a pickaxe in order to drop and were not affected by fire. They also had a stronger blast resistance than wooden planks, which made them a useful building material. Unfortunately, they can't be built with anymore.

In Java Edition 1.3.1, the rest of the wooden slabs (jungle, spruce, birch and oak) were added to replace the petrified oak slabs that were no longer in the game.