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[Rexor]

They're not on the import list, bags of sand and raw glass? I think I read through the list rather carefully.

If you can't import them, I'd request adding them on the list for the next testing release. My white stone tower needs glass windows, damnit! So far, I've used cut gem windows, which must look wonderful, but there's only so much gems and I want to use them for other things as well.

Just making sure, if you want to collect sand, the square must be a sand square? Black sand, white sand etc. Nothing else will do?

[Quietust]

It's already known that you can't import sand and that, as a result, it is entirely impossible to make glass on a map without sand. While strange moods seem to recognize this (i.e. glassmakers will use rough gems instead of raw glass, and other moods will never ask for raw glass you don't have), nobles are too stupid to realize this and will still mandate items you cannot possibly make.

Only "[color] sand" can be gathered (by placing an appropriate activity zone over it) - "sandy loam" and "loamy sand" won't work.

[Smew]

You can also mod whatever soil layer you have to be sand, just by going in there and adding the [SOIL_SAND] tag to it/them.

Or, if you want to take the more dwarfy way, you can mod a creature to drop sand on death, which I think I've found to be possible, or maybe not, hmm.

[Rexor]

That's a shame. Oh well. I'll look into modding, if not having sand starts bothering me badly enough. Thanks for setting me straight.

Here's the above ground part of my fortress, called Light of Hearts. Light of Hearts because it brings light to the hearts who come across it, it's a bastion of good in terrifying surroundings. The tower is only three stories high thus far, I'll build it up to at least 12 stories. You can see the different color windows on the 2nd and 3rd floors. It'll probably look like a gay pride tower when it's finished (since it'll be colored like a rainbow). The fortress is being plagued by skeletal camels, which have taken a heavy toll on my dwarves, but I'm strong enough now to repel any new waves of them easily.

Visual fortress screencap:

[Zantan]

Or, if you want to take the more dwarfy way, you can mod a creature to drop sand on death, which I think I've found to be possible, or maybe not, hmm.

I'm not sure if you could do it in this version, but in the next release you should be able to make creatures made of sand that drop sand on death, which would be awesome.  Even better would be if these rare and powerful sand creatures make a special and valuable kind of sand.  Maybe rather than having a fixed population in a biome, they created themselves in haunted deserts.  It would be pretty epic.

The only problem is that your hunters would need to have furniture hauling enabled to return the kill...

[XSI]

Apparently, on sandless maps there are still a few ways to create sand.

I've heard of these, but never tested any of them(Except by mistake).

1. sometimes a stairway can cause a tile of stone to spontaneously turn into a sand tile, I've personally did this on a glacier by mistake, I have no idea how I did it, but I know I was messing around the stairway for at least 3 minutes.

2. A towercap that has been cut down is rumoured to leave a sand tile behind.

3. You can just mod the local stone layer to have [soil_sand]

[Quietust]

1. sometimes a stairway can cause a tile of stone to spontaneously turn into a sand tile, I've personally did this on a glacier by mistake, I have no idea how I did it, but I know I was messing around the stairway for at least 3 minutes.

2. A towercap that has been cut down is rumoured to leave a sand tile behind.

#1 looks to be related to the behavior of building a construction on a non-layer stone and having it reset to the layer's default. The very bottom layer of ice seems to be hacked to have a stone floor below it even though it isn't in a stone layer, so when it tries to reset the floor to the layer type, it ends up using a random soil type, which is sometimes sand. Apparently, digging down-stairs is enough to trigger this behavior with ice.

#2 is similar, in that underground plants (shrubs and tower-caps) reset the floor material to be soil appropriate to the biome, and since mountain biomes don't have soil, it picks a random one. My fortress's tower-cap farm has some black sand (in the forest biome) and some silt loam (in the mountain biome).

[MrFake]

Might as well just Tweak in a tile of sand.  It's guaranteed to work without mucking with mods or random glitches in the Matrix.  40d and up.  You can even add it in quasi-realistic places, like on the river banks, just so you don't feel like as big a cheat (which you will be, but no worries, that's part of DF too).

[Shakma]

If you just want windows, just import loads of gems.  You can probably get 50 or more with each caravan if you request them all.