Minecraft wiki entry for Beginner%27s_guide, associated text: Once the player has crafted a pickaxe, they can successfully acquire cobblestone to make better tools. Cobblestone is collected by finding stone then mining it with any pickaxe. Stone mined with any pickaxe drops as a cobblestone item. Besides the "original" gray stone, there are three other kinds of rock you can find, which are good for building, but you cannot use them to craft tools. White diorite and red granite are fairly obvious, but andesite is also gray, and can easily be mistaken for proper stone; when you start mining, check the block that you get in your inventory to make sure it's actually cobblestone instead of an andesite block.