Redstone Builds Everyone Should Know

I make fairly complicated redstone contraptions which is interesting for those of you who understand fairly complicated redstone contraptions but if you don’t understand fairly complicated redstone contraptions then the entire process could be fairly confusing now don’t get me wrong you can be fairly confused and also fairly interested at

The same time but you would be more interested if you were less confused and that’s where this video hopefully comes in i do believe this is the most confusing start to a non-confusing video i’ve ever made in this video i’m going to be running through 20 different redstone circuits and redstone

Contraptions that i personally think are incredibly useful and think that every single minecraft player should know second number one the auto item dropper anyone who watches the hermitcraft series will be very familiar with these things essentially they automatically detect when the dropper is filled with items making use of this comparator right here

And then this little redstone circuit creates a redstone clock with this piece of redstone dust powering the dropper causing it to gradually spit out his items and when it’s empty all the redstone clocks turn up now this is useful for automatic farming system sorting systems item elevators basically anywhere where you’re transporting items

These things come in handy this design is really cheap consisting of three pieces of redstone dust a comparator a repeater a dropper and then a handful of building blocks and of course you don’t have to place your items directly into the dropper you can run items in via

Hopper lines on any other sides of the dropper next up we’ve got the redstone lamp button panel this is a circuit that i like to use inside of my base to activate various areas of my base and have an indicator as to which parts are actually activated so for example down

Here we have item frames that in theory correspond to various different farms currently our melon farm is activated if i hit this button then that will activate our sugarcane farm and that redstone lamp turns on i hit this button that turns on the bamboo farm if i hit

This button again you can see that the redstone lamp switches off suggesting i’ve turned off the sugarcane farm now this is achieved through the use of one wide tileable t-flip-flops now to quickly break that down one wide of course means the actual circuit itself is one block wide tileable means that

You can stack them next to one another here i have three but you could have as many of these as you want all just piled up next to one another and then t flip flop is short for toggleable flip flop so when i hit this button we’re sending

A pulse into the circuit but that pulse is being converted into a toggle so currently we have toggled it off and then if i hit the button again we toggle it back on now what we’re doing with this circuit the only thing that makes this special is not only are we taking

An output out the back that we can send off to the various farms or whatever we’re running this into but we’re also running an output back into the redstone lamps so we have a clear indicator as to when the toggleable flip-flop is toggled on or toggled and yes we could just use

Levers in this situation but that is nowhere near as cool the key card reader if you’ve ever wanted to make it a part of your base a little bit more secure then this is probably one of the best ways of doing it inside this dropper right here i’ve got my specific key card

If i put any other item inside of this thing you can see it doesn’t go through there’s absolutely no redstone output the only way that we can get a redstone output through this circuit is if we put the correct key card in and that has to

Be the right item and also the right name for the item so there are a huge number of possible combinations here like more than there are stars in the universe you’d have to be incredibly lucky to guess it correctly unless they’re trying to work out mine in which

Case it’s incredibly predictable the way that the whole thing works is out the back we’ve got ourselves an item filter which only accepts these subscribe to mumbo items so if i try and shift click any of these items in none of them are going into the hopper the only one that can

Is that specific item and this dropper is essentially doing that so if i place any old item inside here when i hit this button that dropper tries to shoot the item into the hopper and it can’t because there’s no space for it so nothing happens the only time that

Something can happen is when the correct key card gets sent into the system circuit number four the hopper minecart loading station this circuit is useful for transporting large quantities of items and also i’ve recently found a use for it in super smelters so this hopper minecart is going to grab items from

Inside this chest right here and the number of items is going to grab is set by this hopper so there are two stacks of items inside of this hopper which means that we should end up with around about two stacks of items inside of our hopper minecart before it leaves and

Travels off further down the circuit so you can see everything’s filling up it fills up incredibly quickly and then we should get yep there we go and it’s been sent off now say for example we only wanted our hopper minecart to travel off when it’s filled it’s completely filled up we can

Actually remove all of this and just power the side of the comparator making use of this little circuit i’m quickly going to just do the roughest explanation of what the comparator is doing here so we’ve got a signal strength of 15 running into the side of the comparator and when we send

This hopper minecart across as it gets fuller it’s increasing the signal strength running out of it but you can see we’re not getting an output because this is the comparator is comparing the only time that we’re going to get a redstone output is when the signal coming from our hopper minecart is

Greater or equal to the signal that’s coming into the side of the comparator hence the name comparator so just there you saw that a hopper minecart fully filled up it gave a signal strength of 15 the comparator did its comparison and decided they match up it’s equal we get

An output and that allows our hopper mine cart to travel up and this original setup with the two stacks in the hopper minecart works in exactly the same way it just doesn’t require a signal strength of 15 to move off instead requires a signal strength of say five

Or six is it just me or is this more confusing than my regular redstone videos next up we’ve got the hopper minecart unloader this is essentially the direct opposite of this redstone circuit but thankfully it operates a lot more simply so if we fill items inside

Of this top minecart here and then send it over to this side it’s now over the top of the hopper and items are gradually being removed from it now while there are items inside of this hopper which is taking the items from this top of minecart while there are

Items inside of here it’s giving a comparator output which is going to deactivate this powered rail so that means that hop on minecart is going to stay there until eventually we run out of items then of course there’s no more items running through this hopper which means there’s no comparator output which

Means that our powered rail gets powered and a hopper minecart moves on here comes an incredibly popular one the item filter if you watch the hermitcraft series or basically any series that involves at least even the tiniest bit of redstone circuitry then you definitely will have seen these and

These circuits are exactly the same as the ones that we used inside the key card system they’ve just been made one wide and tileable so that we can stack them next to one another creating storage systems that look a little bit like this but in principle they work in

Exactly the same way except instead of firing the items in making use of droppers we’re going to feed the items in making use of water streams but these are the items that we want to sort these ones in the front slot and if we shoot some items in that don’t match up with

That you’ll see they get fired out the end but if we fire in an item that does match up with that then you can see that drops down into the hopper and then makes its way down into the chest now a few questions that i can see coming up

The first one being what does this chest do and the answer is nothing functionally in terms of the redstone but it’s incredibly important when it comes to aligning the items you see the items actually are traveling over the top of glass they’re not traveling over the top of the hoppers but the reason

They can still get sucked into the hoppers is because this chest isn’t quite a full block so that means if we throw items in they hit up against the side of that chest and then they go along the side of the block over the top of both the glass and also the hoppers

Meaning they can still make their way in the next question is probably about these rather strange items inside our item hoppers now these are here for overflow protection the key to a successful item filter is you only want items going into the first slot of the harper as soon as these ones start

Getting involved then everything breaks so the reason they have such a long name is because you want to reduce the possibility that an item that matches up with the placeholders that we’re using here actually flows through the system for example if we just had unnamed cobblestone then that would actually get

Picked up by the hopper and there you can see that already things are starting to break now why are they starting to break well it’s because this entire item sorter relies on signal strength and if the signal strength from one of the item filters is too strong because it’s

Filled up with items then it’s going to spread to all the other item filters and it’s going to drain them of items which means that your item sorter has stopped being an item sorter and it’s just a big mess that was a long one right button selector panel now i know what you’re

Thinking haven’t we already gone through a button selector panel in this video and technically yes we have but this one is ever so slightly different you see this is a single output button selector panel so you see we’ve got these three buttons right here and the last button i

Press is going to be the one that gives an output now this works making use of an rs latch array now to quickly explain what rs nor latch is it’s a circuit that can only be turned on from one side and only turned off from one side so if i

Hit this button that turns it off but if i hit the button again it’s not going to turn back on the only way that i can get it to turn on is by hitting this button but if i hit this button again it’s not going to turn off and just to make it

Clear the way that we’re getting the comparator output from these droppers is from the item that’s inside that’s being passed back and forth between the droppers now that all sounds incredibly pointless until you start stacking them next to another so the way that this system works is whatever button we press

This redstone line up at the top is going to be activated and that is going to turn all of the rsnor latches off so all of them are going to be switched to the off position and then once that’s happened all of the outputs are off the

Redstone torch that is behind the button that we have pressed will turn on which will then activate the on part of one of the rs latches giving us a single output that corresponds to the button that we just pressed next up we’ve got the piston feed tape now this one looks

Quite big scary and complicated but i can promise you it’s actually really quite simple and these are some of my favorite redstone circuits to play around with essentially what we’re doing is we’re cycling blocks around by firing pistons in a specific order all we have here is a one tick

Monostable circuit that is a circuit that creates a one tick pulse through the redstone which is incredibly quick as you can see and that pulse first runs into these pistons which will both fire pushing these blocks upwards and these blocks downwards and then two ticks after those pistons have fired these

Pistons will fire pushing those blocks across and those blocks across like that creating an endless cycle of blocks they just they keep cycling around next up we’ve got the smart piston this is useful for when you want to transport full blocks so for example if you’ve got a cobblestone generator then this will

Come in handy if you’ve got a tree farm and you want to push blocks around definitely is going to be useful essentially it’s a system that detects a block and will immediately move it out the way so it goes across like this and you can chain them together so you can have a

Smart piston that then runs into another smart piston which moves your blocks across like this and you can have it going upwards and downwards and basically just a big snaking conveyor belt of blocks it’s quite self-explanatory how it works but i’ll quickly explain when the block pops in

In front of the piston it will then be powered by this redstone torch which will then power that piece of redstone dust which in turn then powers the piston pushing it out of the way which then unpowers the entire thing next up we have another piston feed tape this

One’s kind of a mix of smart pistons and also piston feed tapes all we have to do is power this piston right here and then the system does the rest through a series of smart pistons so these three pistons right here are all smart pistons these observers are detecting the

Movement of blocks and then powering the pistons and essentially it creates a smart piston feed tape that we can use nicely now you may be wondering why we don’t use these all the time it’s simply because first off you get one less block in the same amount of space and secondly

They’re a tiny bit slower but they’re still incredibly useful piston feed tapes are a little bit weird and i can’t really name when you’re going to find a use for them but you will eventually find it used for them even if it’s just to look really really cool anyway water

Elevator as i’m sure most of you already know if you place magma underneath water then you fall down through it quickly and if you play soul sand underneath water then you travel up through it quickly and what this elevator does is it allows us to create a soul sand

Bubble elevator when we walk into it when we want to drop through it then the magma is there now this is achieved through a block swapper connected up into a pulse extender so this is the block swapper part of the circuitry including this block down at the bottom

Which looks like it’s doing nothing but this redstone is actually providing an update to this piston so it can realize it’s being powered by this target block because this is some quasi connectivity stuff i’m not going to explain that in today’s video but i have done a video on

It in the past it’s a little bit too complicated to explain in compressed form and then this right here is the pulse extender this essentially takes the pulse from our pressure plate and extends it and as you can see we’re making use of a target block right here

To redirect the redstone signal actually into our block swapper now of course if your water elevator is bigger than mine which i certainly hope it is because mine is pathetic then you’re gonna have to increase the size of your pulse extender by adding more comparators into

It to make sure that your soul sand is extended for long enough for you to reach the top next up we’ve got the grass path switch this is a form of hidden activation device so if you want to be able to activate a redstone circuit without having a button or a

Lever on the side of a block then this could potentially be a good option all we have to do is turn this piece of grass into a path and then as you saw there our redstone lamp switches on now this doesn’t just work with converting grass into parts you can also convert

Dirt or grass into farmland and it will have exactly the same effect redstone wise this is really really simple dirt and grass are solid blocks meaning we can send redstone signals through them path blocks and farmland blocks are not solid blocks they’re transparent blocks meaning that there can’t be redstone

Signals passing through them so when we convert our dirt block say into a farmland block it briefly becomes a transparent block which briefly turns off our redstone output and we can use that to activate other things next up we have got the drop evator now i would only really recommend using a system

Like this for transporting items vertically around about this distance i would say five blocks is about the maximum that i personally would use a dropovator anything bigger than that i would suggest just making use of one of these little things hooked up to the bottom of a water elevator with soul

Sand at the bottom and that’s going to be a lot easier and look a lot nicer but regardless of that drop evaders are still incredibly useful and this is incredibly good design so i’m gonna run you through all the different elements first off you can see that our dropper

Down at the bottom here is detecting the items and what this repeater is doing is it’s slowing down the run of items into this thing to make sure that it can continue to be reliable and actually send all of the items to the top correctly and then all we’re

Doing is we’re powering these redstone torches and powering the droppers in the correct order to send the items from the bottom all the way up to the top and one key feature of this design is that it is ticklish it isn’t making a bunch of noise it is completely silent and of

Course it can be expanded vertically upwards if you fancy by just adding to the redstone torch tower out the back here comes one of my personal favorites the vertical flying machine you have to think of these things as being like a bit of a caterpillar okay so the bottom

Section pushes up the top section then the top section pulls up the bottom section then the bottom section pushes the top section up again and so on and so forth and then the opposite happens on the way down and that is achieved through the use of slime blocks and

Observers now the way that we’re activating these things is we just have to cause an update to these observers and the way that we’re causing the update is by just powering these droppers observers can detect the power ring of things that is considered an update and that is how we’re sending this thing

Back and forth and of course flying machines are useful for pretty much everything that they’re they are incredibly incredibly handy the zero tick smart piston so you may remember a little while back we had a smart piston well this is a zero tick smart piston which is essentially the ferrari of

Smart pistons it’s just it’s considerably faster and they’re so much fun to use this is for redstone contraptions where speed is of the essence and you want everything to happen very quickly you make use of these zero tick smart pistons they work in a bit of a strange way it’s exactly

The same as the traditional smart piston so block goes over the top of a redstone torch powers the redstone line which powers the piston but instead of powering the piston directly firstly the piston has to be a sticky piston but secondly the redstone actually has to run up

And be diagonal to the sticky piston and then we have to have this regular piston right here to cause an update to the sticky piston and that creates this zero tick effect the tnt duplicator for anyone who watches the hermitcraft series you’ll be very very familiar with

These things i’ve used them inside of farms i’ve attached them to flying machines to dig absolutely gigantic holes i mean two and two duplicators are fantastic and i’ll be honest it’s the only redstone circuit in this video that i can’t fully explain how it works as

It’s to do with the tnt being powered but in a weird state and getting a strange update from this coral fan it’s all a bit weird but it would feel so wrong not including it in this video of useful redstone contraptions because it’s arguably one of the most useful so

I’ll put a link to these things down in the description the horizontal flying machine these things work in exactly the same fashion as the vertical flying machines they’re just constructed in a slightly different way as you can see though the setup is very very similar the observers power the pistons and it’s

All held together via slime blocks the front section pulls the back section which then pushes the front section again and the great thing about these horizontal flying machines is that you can attach things to the side of them and you can kind of turn them into big sweepers incredibly useful for various

Different types of farms and of course if you want to attach tnt duplicators to them you can also create carpet bombers you may not know this but i’m a massive massive fan of flying machines i’m also a massive fan of piston feed tapes and this is one of the most useful types so

This takes the piston feed tape and it squashes everything down and it makes use of a sticky piston so that it can kind of be one-sided you see all of the redstone is all happening on one side now if we didn’t have this sticky piston instead

We would have a piston facing in this direction and then we’d have circuitry over here but this sticky piston is there to grab this block and pull it back across and that gives us an incredibly compact and small circuit but it works in a very similar fashion to the first piston feed

Tape that i showed you in that we have a monostable circuit down here which is sending a one tick pulse into the system both of these are getting one ticked so this pushes this way this pulls that way and then two ticks later this piston and this piston pushes the blocks across so

That gives us our cycling motion the automatic minecart station this is incredibly useful if you play on a minecraft server that relies a lot on minecart travels so when you walk up to this thing and stand on the pressure plate your minecart will be dispensed

For you so you don’t have to worry about bringing one with you then as soon as you get in the minecart you will travel off you don’t have to do anything and then when you arrive back at the minecart station your minecart will automatically be broken and be dropped

Into the system so that it stays fully loaded that dispenser stays full so then if we want another minecart we want to travel off again then we just hop inside and yeah you get the picture the way that this system works is first off breaking the minecart really easy we

Just run it straight into a cactus and then it gets picked up by these hoppers which then run it straight into this dispenser that’s about as easy as it gets no redstone there but then redstone wise when we stand on top of this pressure plate you can see it powers

This dispenser but then unpowers the minecart rail it unpowers the powered minecart rail which holds the minecart in place but then when we get into the minecart obviously we stand off the pressure plate we’re then off the pressure plate and that redstone torch then turns back on powering our minecart rail allowing

Us to move off it is incredibly incredibly simple but incredibly effective and last but definitely not least we’ve got the tnt cannon i couldn’t possibly do a video about useful redstone contraptions without mentioning this thing it may not be the most useful of all the redstone contraptions but is arguably the most fun

I could do this all day so the first thing that happens when we hit the button is these three dispensers dispense tnt into the water and these are the launcher pieces of tnt they’re the ones that are going to be firing our piece of tnt off into the distance so

They get dispensed first and then once our button pops back out it’s known as the falling edge of the button once that button turns off this redstone torch turns on which then powers this top dispenser right here which then dispenses a piece of tnt a little bit

Later on which means it can be fired and then eventually explode off in the distance and i think that just about wraps everything up this has been an absolute marathon of a recording session my brain hurts so much i would so rather build a really complicated redstone contraption than have to explain more

Simple redstone concepts in a way that everyone hopefully understands that’s so much harder it’s so much more difficult trying to explain every single tiny detail so i hope it was worthwhile i hope you’ve come out of this video i hope you’ve come out of this video learning something new if you have

Please do let me know down in the comment section i really do hope you enjoyed and i’ll catch you in the next redstone video see ya i’ve been meaning to make a video like this for a long time it’s been actually quite a while since i’ve explained some more basic

Redstone concepts and i’m starting to see it creeping in more in the comments section that people are starting to understand less and less of what’s going on so hopefully this bumps it up again and people will begin to understand again then in like three or four years

I’ll have to do another video like this explaining everything that i always talk about