This was a suggestion posed by someone on Neo repo here: neoforged/NeoForge#1257

I'm on the fence about this one. Need more input from people. Does it make sense to have in the tag? And it won't interfere with people currently consuming the dust tag right?

If blaze powder is a dust, then presumably gunpowder is a dust as well.

I think powders should be included in the dust tag. Sugar should be considered as well.

In my opinion, whether sugar is a type of dust depends on the kind of sugar.

• Powdered sugar is definitely dust; I don't think many people will argue about that. It's a very fine dust at that.
• Cane sugar and white sugar are not dust, by my definition, they're more like coarse sand.
• Brown sugar is weird, and we can leave it at that. I'm still trying to figure out how to classify it into a state of matter, let alone a type of solid.

Overall, I'd define dusts as materials that poof when you hit them and take a bit of time to settle. For example, I'd count flour as a type of dust. Fine sawdust could count as a dust as well, though there's a slippery slope between sawdust and wood shavings. Finely ground pepper would be dust. The grit left over from peanut shells is dust.

So the question is, does Blaze Powder poof when you hit it?

I believe the origin/use of the dust tag beyond just redstone dust and glowstone dust was to collect modded machines crushing ingots into dust form and then sticking it into the tag to group it up. Just as background info

painful counterpoint someone just raised.
Concrete Powder

To me dust and powder are synonyms (for the purposes of tags) like stick and rod are, and sugar be it a powder or a dust is dust shaped enough in game for it to be included in those tags.

Concrete powder is an interesting dilema. I don't think there is harm in including it in the tags, but that raises the question of what about the other falling blocks (sand and gravel)?

They are kind of the same thing, but "dust" tends to imply something that is natural, and "powder" tends to imply something that is manmade

From neoforge issue report side:

Yeah, in my mods the only time I really use dusts as a hierarchy is to know that dusts/ can be smelted into ingots/ making its value exactly 1 ingot (no ore multiplication).

Glowstone and redstone don't fit that (anyone adding ingots/redstone means something very different, usually they go with something like ingots/redstone_alloy). Redstone could just as easily be c:redstone or c:powders/redstone and it wouldn't impact the usages. So blaze powder being a dust or not has no impact on me; are people adding alternative types of blaze powder?

So there’s:

Gunpowder
Redstone Dust
Glowstone Dust
Blaze Powder
Concrete Powder
Powder Snow (Powder Snow Bucket)
Sugar

If someone can make a list of which ones should go in the dust item tag and what the javadoc should say to make it clear why just those items are in the tag, then I think we can make progress.