Sometimes it’s the very little things that count.
Ask most people what they think of when they hear the word sand, and you’ll probably get a description of a yellowish-pale-brown color of rock-stuff that grits between your fingers, sticks between your toes, and gets into awkward places in your bathing suit.
Which is a fair description, but as incomplete as saying the sky is blue. One stormy day should cure you of that.
On Hawaii you find beaches of black sand, volcanic rock broken down by the pounding waves of the Pacific. On the Emerald Coast, white-sand beaches drift like tropical snow; the sand is so old, millions of years old, that any hint of organic or clay yellow has long since washed away. Some deserts glitter reddish-purple, filled with tiny garnets that remain when thousands of years of blowing desert gales have eroded all else to dust on the wind.
Sand colors the world, and shapes it; eroding stone, sweeping out to sea, burying oases over years, or the length of one catastrophic storm. And sand is used to shape the world. We make it into glass and concrete, and the grit to cut marble and granite for memories that will not fade. The Roman Empire was apparently doing that last before 100 BC, importing fine Ethiopian sand to cut marble with and coarser Indian sand to polish it. That’s right; the Roman empire sent ships thousands of miles for sand. Very specific sand.
This is something to pause and reflect on when you worldbuild. Yes, a planet or a kingdom may have everything it technically needs to survive. That’s like saying so long as you’ve got one screwdriver set and a hammer, you don’t really need any more tools to fix things.
Humans are tool-using creatures, and there is nothing like just the right tool for the job. That tool might be a needle to sew, Vietnamese cinnamon instead of standard to make a sweet dish hotter, or – yes – just the right grade of sand to grit your project.
People will go to great lengths and expense to get exactly what they want, instead of something that’s just “good enough”. Merchants and nations will trade accordingly. And merchants will go out looking for new things, or newer twists on old things – a hotter chili, a whiter sand – gambling that will turn out to be something “just right” for enough customers to make the trip worthwhile.
There is a world in your grain of sand. Build it!