This modded Minecraft sponge is so powerful it can slurp up an ocean

Sponges in Minecraft are pretty darn absorbent—a single sponge block can suck up a total of 65 blocks of water before it becomes completely filled and needs to be dried out in a furnace.

But is 65 blocks really enough? Minecraft is full of swamps and lakes and inlets and oceans and sometimes all that pesky water gets in the way of what you're trying to do, whether it be a construction project or the investigation of an underwater monument.

A modder named Quanted on Reddit wasn't happy with the absorbency of Minecraft's vanilla sponges, so they created their own modded sponge. And boy can it sop up water. A lot of water. All the water?

When placed in water, the modded sponge spreads in six directions, replacing water blocks with empty air (and leaving a lot of confused squids flopping around). The intention is for the sponge to expire after 150 blocks, but as Quanted demonstrates, the mod code can be tweaked for the sponge to simply keep absorbing water forever. You might need some of that water to put out the flames on your GPU, from the looks of it.

Quanted hasn't released the mod yet, saying "this was just a proof of concept, but since a lot of people appreciate it I will publish this mod. This week I'm very busy, but then I will do my best to finish the mod and share it to the world." That was a couple weeks ago and I haven't seen another post with the mod arrive yet, but hopefully it will be available soon.

Luckily, there's also a data pack version of a super sponge that seems to work in a similar fashion, made by another clever creator on Reddit called Plagiatus, inspired by Quanted's mod above. You can grab the data pack on github, where you'll also find installation instructions. If you're hopping back into Minecraft in 2019, see what's new with our handy Minecraft update log.