I would like to be able to decorate a room using coral without it being in water and without it turning gray.
Interesting. I am indifferent on whether this would be desirable or not, but I'm curious what others think.
Place a top half slab and then place water under the bottom part of slab to water log it. Then place coral on the half slab. I tested it and it does works. With the coral block it can only be one high though. Hope this helps
I would like to decorate a room *without the use of water. Basically build a "tree" type structure of coral
why not make the room totally full of water with a conduit hidden somewhere? I don't even know if the conduit would be necessary if it's in town. Can you drown in town?
Fertile land requires water, just as coral does. This is a fundamental property of a block intended by Mojang.
That's kind of apples and oranges though. Coral is a purely decorative block, whereas farmland serves an actual function and the price of obtaining that function is sacrificing a few blocks of farmland to use as water space. The coral limitation is simply annoying and serves no actual purpose to balance the game.
By that logic we should make flags to stop gravity for colored concrete sand, etc. We don't know what Mojang could have in store for coral and currently the limitation is set by the game itself as a part of its very nature. It's coral and coral dies with no water, just like regular ice melts with too much light, etc. Maybe Mojang will change it in the future, maybe not. This is something we'll be leaving to them though. Edit: Spoke with the technical peeps and they confirmed that another reason we can't do this change is because the coral would keep trying to die with the flag, due to its nature, thus resulting in the event firing to the server in a continuous manner. You can imagine the technical issues to result. #laggycoral
