Eric Sorensen
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Well here's what I've been doing. I wanted to get a bunch of flint, so I stacked up a bunch of gravel so I could mine it very quickly. When I stack the gravel up underneath myself and dig down with my Fortune-3 shovel, I get ONLY flint. No gravel whatsoever. I stack up 60+ blocks of gravel, and I get 60+ flint, no gravel. But when I have gravel stacked up and dig from the bottom, I get a bunch of flint, but I also have gravel raining down from above, not even from where I'm mining, as if the blocks are breaking as they fall instead of from where I'm mining. The point is that there may be a glitch in digging falling blocks like gravel.
FYI, here's what the Minecraft wiki (http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Flint) says:
"When a block of gravel is mined, there is a 10% chance that a single piece of flint will drop instead of the gravel block. When mined with a Fortune-enchanted tool, this chance is increased to 14% at Fortune I, 25% at Fortune II, and 100% at Fortune III. Gravel mined using a tool with Silk Touch will never produce flint." (Emphasis mine).
The wiki basically says that gravel blocks will only drop one or the other, not both; and that at Fortune-3 will drop only flint. You get multiple drops for other things (e.g., seeds from wheat), but not gravel, since its drop mechanic is always to give you one or the other.
It's definitely NOT silk touch that I'm using, and definitely NOT silk touch that I am thinking of. The enchantment I am using is Fortune 3. When I use it on any single gravel block, I get flint every time, which is the expected behavior for Fortune 3.
The difference is when I use it on a tall column (~60 blocks) of gravel: In that case, I get flint from the base, but gravel also rains down from above, giving me about a 50/50 pickup rate.
Basically. I was mining a 1x60 tower of gravel, actually; but yes, when I mine it with a Fortune-3 shovel, I'm seeing gravel drops falling from above. I'm still getting lots of flint too, but not 100%, as expected.