Doing Redstone how Mojang Intended (Then doing it better)

It’s time for us to learn some redstone mojang sell an official minecraft guide to redstone and inside of it are explanations as to how redstone components work they have a few redstone circuits in there and then they have a few full redstone contraptions that you can build and i

Gotta say i’m really impressed with the product it’s a really high quality item all of the instructions are incredibly easy to follow everything seems to sort of make sense but i think it’s safe to say that the redstone contraptions that are included in the book are a little bit weird from a redstone

Perspective and there is a reason for this i think it’s because they’ve been designed to teach the person who’s building the redstone contraptions how redstone works so they use slightly strange circuits and slightly strange methods to achieve things but they do this so that the player actually learns how to build these circuits

And how to do these things but the upside of this is there’s plenty of room for me to improve things so the first redstone build that we’re going to be looking at today is the so called secret piston passage and here it is hit this button

This little piston door opens up and we can make our way into a tiny little secret passage redstone-wise it is ridiculously simple so i don’t think we’re going to improve the simplicity here the only slight grope is it’s not really that secret i mean there’s a there’s a button on the

Wall so let’s get rid of that thing and maybe swap it out for a redstone torch key that we can then if we place a piston down here that will extend something across and then i mean maybe something like that could even work you know we could have something like this

And then when we place in a redstone torch it opens and remove i mean all we need is something to break that redstone torch i’m getting somewhere with this idea so if i place in the redstone torch you can see the redstone torch gets broken

And then the block moves out the way so we can we can do something like that the only issue is is that our door has now stopped working properly that is kind of a big issue i mean this maybe isn’t this maybe isn’t the simplest design i can understand why

They didn’t have this in the redstone book because it doesn’t look like it makes any sense whatsoever imagine you’ve just learned what redstone dust does and then the first redstone contraption in the book looks like this i mean essentially what’s happening here is is this observer is detecting the door opening up

And then it’s sending a redstone signal through to this piston down at the bottom here which causes it to retract its block so it does all function well i mean it all works well and it fits nearly within the footprint of the original design but it’s definitely weird weird but

Improved definitely improved right let’s look at something else that’s weird i’ll be honest i can’t remember the last time that i saw a redstone clock that looks like this i mean they were occasionally used way back in the day like a very very long time ago but as i say

It’s been it’s been many many years since i’ve seen one of these things this is referred to as the piston clock and it’s very big and it’s very loud and i feel like we can do something that creates the same effect without the bigness and the loudness and yeah i mean

As i expected this this does the trick just a bunch of observers in a little circle running an update through one another i mean all problems basically in minecraft are fixed using observers as you can see here the timings are exactly the same everything stays in sync but it’s it’s a

Lot smaller and it doesn’t definitely with that being said this redstone circuit teaches you a lot about minecraft redstone it teaches you how blocks can be powered to then power redstone lines it teaches you about one tick pulses it teaches you about smart pistons it teaches you about redirecting redstone

Signals there’s a lot going on here i’d say there is a lot more value in understanding how this redstone contraption behind me works than just building this one without really understanding what it’s doing basically what i’m trying to say is mojang please don’t hate me now one

Thing that neither of these designs can do particularly easily is toggle off so i went away and created an even smaller design that actually has an off switch and it’s even weirder than that one you know this one involves droppers being powered and then observers detecting the powering of the droppers

And then these hoppers right here are to make sure that all of the droppers are silent because otherwise it would make this really really annoying noise going from 108 blocks in volume down to 36 blocks in volume whilst becoming toggleable and silent it’s a very strange design but i love it

There’s also this smaller silent design but when you toggle it off then it powers one of the redstone outputs and i don’t really like that i’ve spent far too long looking at this weird redstone clock next up we’ve got the mob farm trap now the idea of this thing is you have this

Little area of shade right here any mobs that are outside in the daylight will start burning up and they will hopefully make their way to the shade yeah well yeah i mean hopefully they’ll make their way to the shade eventually and then they will fall through the

Trapdoors and be hit by those fire charges that are constantly being shot out by those dispensers right there i mean it’s four fire charges every single shoots and i mean we haven’t that wasn’t the best example of disney working once again i don’t think mojang are actually recommending that you build this thing

In survival i think they’re just showing you how redstone clocks can interact with hoppers and dispensers and all sorts of different redstone components at least i sincerely hope that that is the case what i find arguably most strange about this redstone circuit is that to get the items into the chest from this

Hopper hopper platform up here it actually tells you to run the items down into droppers which then shoot the items across into hoppers that are facing downwards even though these hoppers are directly underneath the hopper platform so they could very easily just take the items down into the chests

And of course the constant firing of fire charges which is incredibly expensive is also a little bit bizarre i can think of far better ways to kill mobs but it’s all for the good of education oh yeah you also can’t turn this thing off without breaking it it’s

All for the good of education it is really difficult to access the chests that are in the middle here education but what would it look like if i was writing this redstone book well unfortunately it probably wouldn’t actually involve that much redstone at all which i guess

Is a bit of an issue for a redstone book but i would probably instead of relying on shade rely on mob pathfinding trying to get towards me and then rely on with the roses to kill off the mobs instead of using fire charges and then underneath

Those were the roses i’m going to have a bunch of minecart hoppers which will pick up the items and move all of them into this chest right here let’s see how well this goes then so instead of me in the middle i’ve used a villager and we’re just going to

Use some zombies here let’s give a pretty healthy number of them and i mean i would call that a success that’s uh yeah that’s gone well that has gone well are getting absolutely destroyed by the with the roses there and eventually when they die all the items are now on the floor and

They are all being picked up by a minecart hopper and they’re making their way into the chest fantastic okay let’s get a little bit more risky now this this could go south very very fast but if i stand where this villager is and put myself into survival mode

Nothing is exploding just yet all of them are dying and all of their gunpowder is going to be picked out i think it’s safe to call this a bit of a success now before all of you start shouting me down in the comments section saying this design is

Far more expensive because it uses weather roses number one you could use magma blocks and number two you have to remember this design used about eight fire charges per second moving swiftly on we’ve got the armor stand swapper and this thing is actually really really cool

So you can see when we flick the lever all of our armor stands get switched out and we’ve got three of them in the chamber which is pretty nice and the way that it functions is is sweet it’s a really nice simple little design the only thing that has me a tiny bit

Miffed is why they went for a lever i mean all of this redstone is great but then the lever you actually have to flick twice to make it work which is yeah it’s a little bit bizarre especially when you could just go over here and swap it out for a button and

Sure there’s a little bit of delay when you hit the button for when it activates but you only have to press it once which i would say is a little bit easier i really can’t see why they choose to use a lever in this situation but i digress

As i say the redstone circuit itself is actually really quite cool so it’s going to be difficult to improve upon this thing i just want to know that i’m categorically not expecting this design to work but i’m just curious about it no it’s yeah it’s broken yeah it’s very broken oh but

There is a glimmer of hope there is a glimmer of hope and i’m gonna have to do something weird to make this thing function but promise me i think we could be onto a winner here right let’s have a look let’s have a look and that looked like it functioned didn’t it

Let’s get these guys kitted out in the finest clobber it goes now we should be able to see what’s happening and it actually works this weird little redstone circuit does actually function this is a tiny llama stand swapper it is smaller in every single way and also it functions faster than this

Design over here i would consider that to be an absolutely enormous win do i think it belongs in the official guide to redstone no i feel like if you read this and saw this it would just confuse you further and you’d never want to touch redstone

Again but i guess it’s a bit of a counter point you know this this circuit right here which is a little bit confusing to redstone beginners is also in the guide to redstone so maybe maybe they are open to confusing weird stuff maybe minecraft redstone just in general is confusing

And weird and we just have to embrace that that might actually be the truest thing i’ve ever said in my life now for our final redstone circuit in mojang’s official guide to minecraft redstone we’ve got what’s called the piston squisher we walk inside of here and

We are now trapped now i think initially this was meant to suffocate you i think this was designed before we were able to crawl but now it’s still it’s still a really annoying thing that you can’t actually get out of without breaking blocks i really like the idea

But it is quite big and bulky and i definitely think we could make some changes to this thing to make it function a bit better one thing i will say is the way they pop up the bottom pistons is actually really smart i mean i can’t i can’t really improve upon this

So the pressure plates are what’s actually powering the pistons this redstone line right here isn’t actually powering anything it’s not doing anything it’s just giving updates to the pistons so that they extend when we walk over the pressure plates i’m a tiny bit embarrassed to admit that i potentially

Wouldn’t have thought of doing it like that but i might have ended up doing something a little bit bigger and bulkier i think the key difference between my design and this one over here is the top section this top section just seems absolutely enormous and it seems to have

A huge number of repeaters for what is actually going on here once again i think this is to teach the person who’s building the redstone contraption what delay is and potentially how to power pistons from above maybe teach them that you can power them in this way i’m not entirely

Sure it’s certainly teaching them something anyway this design is now finished so if we pop inside everything should work as expected so we have been crashed downwards i can’t escape this place and quite frankly it’s actually a little bit frustrating it’s a tiny bit annoying because this

Looks like i should be able to get through and then the block pops up it doesn’t kill me like it’s probably meant to but it’s still it’s an annoyance so there we go that is me building up mojang approve redstone and then improving upon the mojang approved redstone this has actually been

A ton of fun i genuinely really like the idea of the redstone book i understand what it’s trying to do i just you know when i see a redstone contraption that can be improved i just can’t help myself i’ll put a link to where you can purchase it down in the description

And there are more redstone contraptions in there so if you’d like to see more videos like this then please let me know down in the comment section but anyway i hope you enjoyed and i’ll catch you in the next video see you now one very funny thing about this redstone video

Is that when i actually purchased this book arrived from amazon and i opened it up in front of my girlfriend she thought that i had bought it so i could learn more about redstone as if i was doing research like i bought a redstone textbook on the

Internet that would allow me to make better redstone videos oh bless her