Borrowed from a *very* old suggestion of mine.

Based on this tweet by the new Minecraft dev, chests and most other tile entities (blocks with extra data) will be pushable by pistons in 1.10 Soon™! This is exiting news and opens up a lot of opportunities, but if added alongside a new type of storage block, it would be even more useful!

Enter the Barrel!

Barrels would be a new type of storage block similar to a wooden chest. They would hold 27 items and be accessed via right-clicking. They might look something like this.

However, barrels would be affected by gravity, like sand, gravel, and anvils! Want to drop some supplies down to your buddy? Fill a barrel and drop it down the mineshaft! More importantly, barrels would be able to be launched using TNT and slimeblocks (with some careful timing) similar to current anvil cannons. This could be used for item drops in minigames, explosive storage systems, and Rube-Goldberg-esque item elevators!

Barrels might have a recipe like this:

=> [Makes ? barrels]

Barrels would not snap to each other like regular chests do, but this would allow barrels to be placed side-by-side with other barrels for compact storage (though this can already be done with trapped chests, the barrels would provide a nice-looking alternative). They would be broken fastest with an axe and be non-flammable. Similarly to chests, they would be slightly smaller than a full block, either chest-size or with the dimensions of a cobblestone/mossy cobblestone wall (while still being only 1 block tall, rather than 1.5). Barrels would have all the item-holding and transferring properties as chests, including:

• Having hoppers and hopper minecarts be able to add and remove items from them
• Having droppers be able to drop single items into them
• Dropping itself and all of its contents when broken

Aside from aesthetics and compact storage, barrels would share several of the unique gravitational properties of sand, gravel, anvils, the Dragon Egg, and primed TNT:

• When the block underneath them is removed, they turn into a fallingsand entity with its own block ID and tile entity data, so it looks like a barrel when falling and retains its inventory.
• If it falls on any non-solid block (such as a torch, slab, or pressure plate) it will break, dropping itself as an item entity as well as all of its contents, just as if it were broken by the player.
• If it falls into a liquid, it would sink down to the bottom of the liquid and replace the bottom liquid block. The entity form of the falling barrel would not be burnt up by fire or lava.

These properties would make the barrels unique and allow for interesting uses.

That's about it! I'd appreciate your thoughts on the idea, as well as any additional suggestions/critiques to it. Thanks for reading!