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[Shintaro Fago]

Is it possible to collect sand in custom workshops? If it is, how?

Thanks!

[GreatWyrmGold]

Kinda. If you make a custom reaction that takes a bag and puts sand in it, you are faking the collect sand reaction.
I don't think you can make it require a sandy area past self-imposed restrictions, though.

[_DivideByZero_]

Why not just collect sand?

[IT 000]

Like the glass furnace? No, we can't interact with zones yet.

You could make a custom reaction that puts the sand in the bag, but that would open the door to cheating because you would not actually need sand.

My suggestion would be that you could gain sand by grinding rocks, have a reaction that takes a boulder and makes sand. Should make it slightly less prone to cheating.

[000]

Hm, I think sand can be smelted into glass due to its chemical compositon or something like that. So, which stone have similar enough composition to semi-realistically produce glass-able sand?

[IT 000]

Sandstone 

You appear to be right, according to wiki

Silica (the chemical compound SiO2) is a common fundamental constitute of glass. In nature, vitrification of quartz occurs when lightning strikes sand, forming hollow, branching rootlike structures called fulgurite.

silica is also found in quartz gems.

IMO I would just have ground rocks, it would make it more accessible to the player. I am assuming he is using Corrosion, which makes useable stones extremely hard to find, furthermore it doesn't have sandstone or quartz either.

[GreatWyrmGold]

You could make a custom reaction that puts the sand in the bag, but that would open the door to cheating because you would not actually need sand.

Kinda. If you make a custom reaction that takes a bag and puts sand in it, you are faking the collect sand reaction.
I don't think you can make it require a sandy area past self-imposed restrictions, though.

[Ramirez]

As others have said, making a reaction to grind rock into sand would be the simplest non-cheaty way of doing it.

On the realism side of things, glass is simply amorphous silicon dioxide (silica, SiO2), which is chemically the same as quartz. However three things mean it would be easiest and make the most sense for it to work for any rock:

Silica is the main constituent of what we call "glass", however pure silica glass is very rare in industry, most glass you see today will have large amounts of other metals oxides added, such as sodium, potassium, titanium, aluminium, as well as some compositions having measurable amounts of chlorine or boron or other non-metals.

Secondly, a large proportion of rocks other than quartz are rich in silica, although not to the same degree. Many of them are still pure enough to function to create something we would call "glass". Could also make a reaction to try to leech out the other minerals thuogh chemical means if having 50% silica content in your glass bothers you, or create a reaction which would turn a bag of pure sand and a boulder into 2 bags of "low grade sand" which can not be further diluted.

Thirdly, the category of "glasses" is actually quite a large and diverse one, with silica glass being the one everyone knows about and sees every day. It is possible to create alumina (aluminium oxide) glasses, phosphate glasses and many others. Taking an even broader definition of "glass", and almost any rock or mineral, if you can melt it and cool it rapidly (to stop it forming crystals) can form something classed as a form of glass.

If you dont like the idea of grinding rocks into sand for your glass, you could create a workshop made up of a barrel and a large amount of sand bags (so that it can be difficult to gather the sand from traders alone), which then becomes a font of infinite sand with the "fill bag with sand from barrel" task.