Minecraft wiki entry for Snow, associated text: In Java Edition, the only way to mine snow is via a shovel enchanted with Silk Touch. Destroying snow with a non-Silk-Touch shovel yields one snowball per layer. Any other tool, even if enchanted by Silk Touch, destroys the snow and drops nothing. Explosions by TNT or creepers also cause snow to yield a snowball. Snow can also be obtained by causing it to drop into an invalid block space, in which case it drops itself.‌[Bedrock Edition only] The dropped snow layer also corresponds with how many layers were in the broken snow pile. If there are 8 layers of snow, a full snow block drops instead.