How Does Redstone Work in Minecraft Bedrock

Hey this is matt hatter here and i got a bunch of positive feedback on how does mob spawning work video and i thought i would try the same format again if you like this video let me know by liking the video i’m going to have to cut out a bunch of

Detail in this video to make it a reasonable length if you want to know more about a specific component or technique let me know in the comments again i’m not perfect in my knowledge nobody is so if i’m wrong on a topic let me know in the comments let’s get started

I know that this is the part of the video where most people’s eyes glaze over but i have to cover it so bear with me ticks are a unit of time in minecraft think of these as short seconds we have two types of ticks in minecraft redstone ticks and game ticks

For this video we’re really going to focus on redstone ticks when the game is running smoothly without lag we get 10 redstone ticks per second during a redstone tick all of the redstone operations happen in bedrock these things happen in a hash table rather than an array order

Those words probably mean nothing to use let’s talk about what they mean in java addition all operations execute in grid order think about it as setting up a dice on a table and rolling each dice one by one and tallying up the results you can imagine this method is not very

Efficient way of rolling the dice in bedrock the approach is more similar to scooping up all the dice rolling them at the exact same time and recording the results as they land you can imagine that allowing all the dice rolls to occur at the exact same time is much more efficient

But you’ll write down the results in a random order in my opinion that’s the biggest complaint that people have when moving from java to bedrock it’s different and you will be frustrated if you’re taking java redstone and bringing it into bedrock the games are not the same and yes

Some things work better in java but some things work far better in bedrock as well so next we should talk about simulation distance simulation is the area of the world where redstone entity data is processed the rest of the world is suspended it’s just sitting there

The world is divided into chunks and the chunks are groups of blocks that are simulated or suspended together this is why people say you should chunk align your redstone if you don’t half of this machine could be running and the other half of the machine could be suspended potentially breaking the machine

The technical resource pack that blood and i made contains a way to measure the ticking area from the afk spot simply put a stick in the armor stand’s hand and you’ll see the ticking area for various simulation settings Currently the most common simulation setting is four chunks from the player And now that we have the boring stuff out of the way let’s start talking components redstone dust is the wires that we use for putting together contraptions in bedrock the dust is a bit more what you see is what you get it snaps to components it updates it

Shows you how it’s connected through glass and it shows you how the signal is routed there are a few bugs the representation is not 100 accurate notably a redstone lines redirect to the back of pistons technically also point in the forward direction and that’s tripped me up in the past

However for the most part what you see is what you get if you see redstone connected it works that way this is not true in java edition as redstone doesn’t travel up and down blocks as expected and can be very frustrating to work with early earlier when we were talking about

Redstone devices being randomly calculated there is some predictability here in the timing redstone dust gets calculated before the devices that are powered so in the redstone tick it calculates new dust being powered then the device is receiving powers and then what the devices do one thing to note is that redstone dust

Drops by signal strength of one level per block travel this means that eventually you do need to boost the signal if you’re and make it travel further if you are going to make really big circuits the redstone repeater is a device that accepts redstone power amplifies it to the maximum level of 16

Then delays and potentially extends the signal and the component can be configured to delay by a tenth of a second all the way up to four tenths of a second it’s important to note that if you send a signal to a repeater that is one tenth of a second long

And you have the repeater on four tenths of a second the pulse width will be extended this can be a big factor when you’re working on signals that use pulses in a specific pulse length the repeater can the repeater also has an often overlooked latch feature

If you use repeaters to power the side of a repeater it prevents the repeater from updating this is one way that people store data in redstone circuits you can lock the repeater and save what is happening at that precise point in time on that repeater using this method Redstone torches are one of the oldest redstone components they provide us with the ability to power redstone as well as boost signal and make a logic operations happen basically the torch is on when the block is attached to is off and vice versa this is the first component that we have

Covered that allows us to conditionally manipulate things using dust and repeaters and torches we can start to make clocks using the torches we can shorten pulses down to one tick using torches we can make certain circuits that require two or more inputs to be power powered on for one device with the torch

Things began to be interesting the torch does add one tick of delay or a tenth of a second to anything that is powering it i have tons of circuits i could talk about here but i’m going to cut it off so that we can cover some other devices

If you want some basic circuits let me know in the comments i can walk through those in the future if you want the next redstone compare component i think we should talk about is the comparator this component allows us to measure things before the comparator all we could do was digital tasks

We could only have on or off and now we can access various levels of on and off so what do i mean by that basically the comparator can be used to detect how full a container is for instance each container is slightly different than how it measures fullness

So i’m going to leave that for as part of your homework but you can make a really simple measurement circuit by placing redstone dust on top of blocks next to redstone lamps i do recommend playing with containers for yourself and seeing how far the signal goes with each type of container

But that’s not all that comparators can do they can also be used to copy the exact signal strength with one tick of delay with that we can make much longer pulse extenders these are called decay circuits and again if you want more about these comparator circuits let me know in the comments but

We have some more functions to cover so we’re going to move on the other two functions the comparator has is to compare signals and subtract signals we’ll start with compare basically if you feed a signal into the side of a comparator the comparator will output a signal if

The input is greater than the signal strength at the side internally it compares these two values and changes its behavior based upon what signal is higher this is very powerful and in my opinion an underused feature of the redstone device in the file function we are going to

Cover today is the subtract function we get this function by right clicking on the comparator and having it turn the front torch on this function works similar to the compare function but it simply reduces the signal strength of the input signal by the amount on the side of the comparator

I use this all the time i when i want to only let a minecraft travel if it has at least a certain number of items in it or if we want to release things at specific signal strength levels again this is very powerful tool hoppers are a way for us to move collect

And transport items in conjunction with comparators they make one of my favorite things in the game the ability to automatically sort items hoppers are able to point in five different directions north south east west and down and they can push pull or hold items if a hopper is powered

It holds the items and does not push or pull them it seems that the hopper does have a predictable order in its own processes it’ll first push an item and then pull an item and if it’s powered on it’ll hold this is part of the metering function

That the hopper does to transfer only a fixed number of items per second the hopper can only process 2.5 items per second and bedrock the order that each hopper is processed is random so we need to think about hoppers acting in isolation rather than as in a chain sometimes the

One hopper will be processed before the hopper next to it and sometimes it’ll be processed after the hopper next to it if you’re willing to slow down the hopper chain you can control thing the way things are to make them very predictable if this if you speed up the redstone

In the filter they also become less random the hopper on average has four ticks between pushes so we need to make sure that we lock the hopper to extend that or we need to make sure that everything happens in two ticks this is to ensure that if the hopper before is processed first

The and the hopper after is processed first that we get the expected results So to walk through this the the comparator will take one tick and if the hopper before has all has not yet pushed it will not be detected and then the next ticket would be detected and then we would want to invert the signal to pull items out and then

While that signal is being inverted the other hopper could have already pushed if we make this a standard java style sorter that’s why we get much better reliability in this orders like mine or the one that science whisperer did pistons are one of the other old components in

Minecraft they allow us to move blocks around the world pistons work very differently on bedrock than in java pistons on bedrock can either push end pull or only push for a very long time the bedrock community has been asking for pistons that push and release this would make flying machines so much

Easier however at the moment what we have to work with is what we got so and before somebody else says this has anything to do with quasi connectivity it doesn’t it has to do with how java processes redstone takes versus game ticks and qc is a completely different bug

And qc is not required to make block splitting work i will rant about qc at the end of the video stick around for that but for now let’s get back to bedrock pistons pistons can move almost any block in the game they can push up to 12 blocks

And the only blocks of the piston can’t move or break at the time of recording is blocks that are made of obsidian i know there are blocks coming that the piston cannot break or move but those are in betas and snapshots and i don’t want to speculate about things they’re not released yet

The piston can be paired with slimer honey to make a more complex machine if you want more information about on slimestone i can do my best in a future video for now i’ll leave it at that for the sake of time moving on in bedrock pistons can redirect redstone

And they can manipulate blocks manipulating blocks is an intended function here however redirects directing redstone is actually quite interesting because in bedrock the piston can pick up power from redstone blocks redstone dust or other power sources and it can have a redstone torch attached to it

It can do something that is really rare it can soft invert a redstone torch this is very useful in redstone projects that are very packed and in tileable contraptions anytime the piston is powered the redstone torch is not powered if you didn’t know the observer is one of my favorite

Redstone contra components the observer looks for changes in the world and it puts out short pulses when a change occurs in bedrock this will generally be pending tick data or block data pending tick is a long story however it is a mechanism that a minecraft bedrock uses to delay the processing of data

From one tick to another tick this is how water updates scaffolding breaks and many other things function there’s some weirdness that occurs due to the pending tick but generally it is the system that bedrock uses to pass data from one take to the next now that we’re we talked about pending

Tick there are some limitations to what minecraft will process generally minecraft will only process 100 pending tick events per game tick that’s why when you move a bunch of water it flows more slowly than if you put down a single bucket this prevents some of the hard freezes

And crashes that occur in java when a huge number of block updates occur in the same tick it sometimes causes crashes on job edition but it because of the limit of a hundred uh events it does not crash in bedrock that also means that we can really only get 100

Observers to fire per redstone tick per chunk after that the game starts to not process them and all the redstone gets a little bit buggy note i said 100 observers per tick that doesn’t mean you need to keep less than 100 observers in a chunk it

Just means that they need to not all fire at the exact same tick if i go into what the observer can and cannot detect we’ll be here for quite a while so i think we’ll talk about how to use the signal from the observer in bedrock you can attach a torch to the

Back side of the serve observer this is super nice for one wide tileable devices being able to invert the observation to say unlock a hopper only when when movement occurs it massively simplifies machines in addition you can use observers and clocks or other pulses and detect the edges both the

Rising and falling edge being able to watch the world is a super powerful tool in the redstone tool chest but it’s a lot to cover in a short video so we’ll leave it there target blocks are a newer component they’re able to redirect redstone and produce redstone power

They’re really handy if you want to redirect and invert a signal for instance if you have a line of dust on one side and you want to invert the opposite side you put a line of target blocks with torches on them and generally this will act the same way

That the piston will but it’s a little bit smaller Note it can only work with redstone dust the piston can also work with redstone blocks pressure plates buttons and buttons are types of simple player input or entity detection a couple of brief points here would buttons hold a signal a little bit longer than stone buttons if you’re going to use an iron

Door i recommend using a wood button to make it easier to exit pressure plates come in three versions heavy weighted light weighted and normal the heavy weighted gives you an analog measurement of the number of entities on the plate it counts in units of ten the lightweight pressure plate get

Counts in units of one so i left a lot out but this is getting to be a little bit of a longer video and i could do a part two on this if you’re interested in but for now i didn’t cover lamps daylight detectors rails trap chest trip wire hooks strings slime honey

Lecterns redstone lamps or really any of the circuits themselves this has been more of a mechanics related video if you want information on those let me know in the comments so now i’m going to rant so if you want to skip to the other video that’s fine but this is my qc rant

So first off qc makes many redstone contraptions bigger just as many as it makes smaller it’s not strictly making things smaller and people are confused by that it has some uses in block update detection before the observer existed it was the only way to do block update detection in the world

Observers were specifically added to bedrock before java to allow for block update detection in a supported manner a qc is purely a way of making an observer before the observer exists using bugs in the code yes qc does allow for turning corners in specific ways they’re not possible

With observers but generally it causes a lot of issues with redstone locking up or contraptions interacting in unintuitive and unexpected ways it isn’t that this can’t be worked around it is that it creates a barrier to entry to redstone for new players and it creates a toxic culture in fact that’s

My biggest complaint with qc if you enter a redstone community on java and you say i don’t like uc you’ll be called names you’ll be made fun of because you would like qc if you were smarter and understood it better the toxicity that qc has added to the java community

Actually has turned me off to the entire version of minecraft in addition the toxicity around my contraption is going to be broken if mojang fix a bug so go yell at them for me is damaging to the game in general i do respect that people invest a lot of

Time in designing their farms or their machines but bugs should die when a farmer machine dies it’s an opportunity for a new innovation and the java community that pushes to keep qc is focused on status quo rather than innovation and that frustrates me pushing your fans onto developers and

Encouraging them to be nasty to other people who are fixing problems with the game is just wrong that res the response the technical community has shown to that bug is simply not okay and it shouldn’t be encouraged when people lobby for bugs to be added to bedrock edition or lobby for bugs to

Be kept they’re stifling innovation they’re putting the developers in a bad spot and we should be pushing for better quality mechanics that make the game easier to play and more approachable not what makes one youtuber’s farm work best and that’s why i hate qc ultimately it exists because of a toxic

Subculture in minecraft not because it’s good and not because it’s the right thing for the game anyway that’s enough with ranting if you want if you learned something from this video please let leave a like if you want more let me know subscribe if you want just in case i do

Make something that you do like in the future anyway this is mad hatter and i’m out bye