Mumbo Jumbo – Are Sculk Sensors Game Changers?

Super fast shameless self-promotion my merchandise is only available for three more days and i think it’s really nice and if you want some get some shown yourself promotion over yesterday yesterday was an interesting chain of events so i recorded a video throughout the entire day on all these things that

Were introduced in the previous minecraft snapshot and i was really really happy with them i was interested in all the game mechanics i had a lot of fun playing around with these game mechanics but then as i was uploading that video which you know i was i was a

Week behind everyone else making their snapshot videos but still as i was uploading that video mojang then dropped a new snapshot and i just knew in my head i didn’t have to look at the features i knew that it was going to involve skulk sensors so that immediately made my snapshot video

All about testing out new redstone features in the snapshots seem a little bit dated so here we are again and i cannot tell you how excited i am to play around with this thing because well i’ve played around with modified versions of it but it sounds like it actually behaves a little bit

Differently you see the skulk sensor is designed to detect movements so for example a dropper clicking that doesn’t activate it a note block playing notes doesn’t actually activate it the only things that activate a skulk sensor are things that move so for example a piston going back and forth that is going to

Activate the skull sensor because we have movement now another thing that happened with the modified versions of the skulk sensor is because it was based on sounds if you went outside of the sound range of the block that was making the sound where you can’t actually hear it anymore the skulk sensor just

Wouldn’t detect it because the sound would stop playing from the thing that is making the sound whereas that does not seem to be the case in the real version of the skulk census which is good because although that was a decently useful game mechanic for detecting players from incredibly long distances

It’s also incredibly broken like there’s a very very broken game mechanic so i’m glad to see that that isn’t actually in the real version but it only gets better from there you see mojang did something incredibly interesting they introduced what’s known as skulk frequencies which means our skull sensor will give a

Different signal strength depending on what is moving so for example if i just land here and start walking around then that will give off a signal strength of one if i jump then that will give a signal strength of five if i open up this fence gate or close this fence gate

Then that will give a much stronger signal strength if i flick this lever i will give another signal strength if i activate this piston that will give a different signal strength and that means that we can detect and isolate specific noises now what on earth do i mean by

Isolate well if we connect up our skulk sensors to some of these circuits then they will only give outputs when a specific redstone signal strength is inputted so this one will only give a redstone output when the signal strength is 10 whereas this one will only give an

Output when the signal strength is what so that means that skulk sensor on the right is specifically listening for footsteps so anything walking around this skulk sensor is going to be detecting it because it’s giving out a signal strength of one and that circuit is specifically designed to only give an

Output on a signal strength of one whereas this skulk sensor on the left is only going to give an output when a player opens up a container so whenever they open a chest it’s only going to give an output then if anything else is happening it’s not going to give a

Redstone output it doesn’t care about that so now that we have a lot of the game mechanics all sized out i think it’s time that we actually start building with this thing and we start where all redstone things start piston doors and i’m hoping that this concept

Should all function so we’ve got the skulk sensors we’ve got observers that run out into redstone dust that is going to be powering our pistons then we have a line of wool that should stop the sound of the pistons going back into the skulk sensors so they should only be

Able to hear our footsteps so we now have a wirelessly activating skulk sensor-powered piston door so we can run it this thing from any angle and it will open before we actually get there which already that’s incredibly cool and it looks even cooler now that i’ve actually placed in all of the

Blocks so this is a proper looking redstone contraption now i’m just curious to see what happens if we actually start removing wool so the sound can travel from the pistons back into the skulk sensors okay yeah things begin to break things definitely begin to break so wool

Now has a fairly interesting property in that it blocks vibrations from traveling from the thing that is causing the vibration to the skull sensor so that means that we don’t get these infinite redstone clocks created because the skulk sensor isn’t able to hear the pistons moving back and forth right let’s design some

Traps then and we’re going to start things off with a really really simple one so the idea is is underneath here i’m going to have my skulk sensor that is going to go in this one singular gap in this gigantic will occluded area now the point of this is i don’t want the

Skulk sensor detecting players walking up okay i don’t want curiosity to be punished but i do want the opening of this chest to be punished as soon as they open this chest that’s where problems are going to arise and you know what i think i’m

Really going to make use of all of the new features that have been introduced in the recent snapshots we’re gonna go full indiana jones here right everything should now all be in place so this is looking pretty deadly if i walk around here as i say absolutely nothing is

Going to happen but as soon as i open up this chest [Laughter] we get spiked from above okay so that’s a little bit of fun let’s get a tiny bit evil and i’m kind of building this in reverse order so we’re starting things off with this rather 2012 looking

Redstone circuit but it does work nicely and of course we’re going to be activating that making use of skulk sensors and the thing that is going to be activating the skulk sensors is this diamond pile up here so the concept is if anyone wants to come in and steal

Those diamonds they’re probably going to have to stand in this 2×2 area and as soon as they break any of the blocks the skull sensor is going to detect it and drop them to their death and the range on these things is pretty impressive i mean if i break that bottom diamond

Block there it actually sends a vibration through to the skulk sensors that’s ridiculous so all the redstone should now be done working one thing i want to point out is the tactical use of this wall block here which does actually stop the sound of the piston from going

Into those skulk sensors it doesn’t look like it would but it does so now we find out how lethal this thing actually is right i’ve got my nether right pickaxe breaking my diamond block and that that was quick that was oh that would be that would be a

Difficult way to go and of course it’s not just based on me breaking the blocks if i even open up this shulker box it’s it’s the end of the day for me so i think it’s safe to say that the skull sensor is going to be absolutely

Incredible for trap designs i’m going to be working on a bunch of them for a full dedicated video that will come out at some point it’s going to be evil like really evil next up we have this idea of wireless redstone signal transfer so i’m thinking if i just place each one of

These little modules seven blocks apart because the only thing that i need to watch out for is the sound of the trapdoor traveling back to this skulk sensor and we’ll end up with a massive feedback loop if i place each one of these modules seven blocks apart so

That’s one two three four five six seven and then skulk sensor and then trapdoor that should mean that all of these will be completely separate from one another and i should be able to send a redstone signal all the way down the line which looks amazing that looks absolutely incredible i mean

Is that not the most satisfying thing in the world not literally in the world i never thought i’d see the day where we could do this sort of thing now what i’m curious about is if we can actually make a two-way system which it totally looks like we can without having these things

Interfere with one another and this i mean that looks like it’s working so if we actually get rid of the wool here obviously that’s where you’re going to start running into issues because if we for example place a block here yeah we get we get redstone signals going all

Over the place and we get things hooking up but this wall means that those two lines are actually kind of insulated from one another so i can send a redstone signal going this way that will activate that redstone lamp but i can also send a redstone signal going this way

Which will activate that redstone lamp well that’s really cool like really cool like really really cool the ability to have a two-way wireless redstone signal sending system i mean i just love the idea of being able to send signals to each other’s bases through the air you

Could even decorate them as if they’re little telephone poles or something yeah i mean you would do a much better job than what i’ve done here this is uh you could probably tell how long this took me in case you can’t tell not long really not long the next thing that i’m

Curious about testing out is proximity detectors so what we have here is a skulk sensor which is listening out for this ocelot and that skulk sensor is connected into an absolutely gigantic pulse extender this looks like a fancy redstone circuit but it’s not it’s just one really really big pulse extender

That runs into this redstone lamp now the reason that we need this gigantic pulse extender is because occasionally this guy gets super lazy and just doesn’t move very often which means there’s long periods of time between the skulk sensor detecting movement and if we didn’t have the gigantic pulse

Extender that means that this redstone lamp would be switching on and off quite a bit and we don’t want that to happen we want this redstone amp to be solidly on when a player is within proximity of this redstone contraption and when a player is outside of proximity we want

The redstone lamp to be solidly off now the way that we’re detecting proximity if you haven’t quite realized is mobs stop moving outside of a certain radius of the player i believe i hope so while i’m near this thing this guy is moving around a lot but when i

Get further away he should stop moving and the redstone contraption should all switch off so let’s see what happens i mean i can still see the pig okay he still looks like he’s moving but he has just disappeared he hasn’t despawned he’s just not visible i’m outside of the loaded range i assume

I think that redstone lamp is going to switch off immediately i mean all the pulse extenders are pretty much switched off there we go the redstone lamp switched off and then if i get closer to this thing we can now see the pig and he should move in a second and our

Redstone lamp should switch on and that means that the design has detected that i am within proximity yeah there we go everything is kicking back into action and if we go far away again yeah i mean look redstone lamps just switched off i’m i’m going to stand here and i’m going to wait

For like 20 minutes i’m gonna look at this thing because i want to make sure that that redstone lamp can’t possibly switch back on while we’re this far away because if it if it can’t then that is incredibly interesting that’s like really really interesting because that means that we can detect players within

Like 100 block radius yep the redstone lamp never switched back on now don’t get me wrong passive mob based proximity detectors have been done in the past but they’ve always been a little bit tricky to build with pressure plates and pistons and things pushing the mob back

Into position whereas this this is a much much simpler setup very very very cool hang on a minute if skull sensors detect vibrations instead of sounds then i’m curious to see what happens here even though a tree growing technically doesn’t make a noise i wonder if it gets picked up

It doesn’t and i’m assuming the same thing goes for stuff like sugarcane growing if we just wait a couple seconds maybe increase the random tick speed a little bit further nope no detection the only thing that gets detected is of course me breaking the sugar cane so i guess that confirms that

This won’t be particularly useful in farming one thing that 2012 me would be incredibly happy with though is how this can be used for magic buttons i used to absolutely love these things you know a button that is floating above the ground looks like it shouldn’t be able to power

Anything but it does now in the past we’ve always had to kind of cheat this a little bit and have it on top of slabs it still looks cool okay but having it fully above the ground looks considerably cooler and if i just hook up all of this redstone so the whole

Thing’s properly wired up this whole system should now be fully functional so if i hit this button then that is going to send the signal through down into the skulk sensor which is going to detect the sound of the button being pressed and it’s going to open up our piston

Door now if i walk on this thing you can see that our skulk sensor is hearing the noise of me walking but it’s not doing anything about it because it’s not the correct signal strength it’s not the right skulk frequency the only thing that is going to get this door to open

Is the skulk frequency of a redstone switch being activated i’m a fan i’m a big fan i mean i gotta say i did not see the skulk frequency coming you know that wasn’t really talked about too much at the event in fact i don’t think it was mentioned at

All and it wasn’t in any of the modifications the modified versions of the skull sensor that i used and it is such a powerful change because it means that you can actually differentiate and decide which frequencies you want your skull sensor to actually tune into which makes

It incredibly powerful it means it’s not just like a blunt hammer where it just detects everything and you’re just trying your best to surround it in wool as much as possible no you can go don’t listen to my footsteps don’t listen to this piston don’t listen to that only

Listen out for this button and then i’m good with you i’m impressed as far as first impressions go this is a strong first impression i i don’t think i’ve been this excited about a redstone component in a very very long time this is super super cool and it’s definitely

Going to revolutionize the way that i approach redstone circuitry and those are some big words so i’m going to be playing around with these a lot over the next couple weeks expect thousands and thousands of skull center videos but anyway i hope you enjoyed and i’ll catch

You in the next one see you oh and is he going to do it again is he going to do more shameless self-promotion i think he is absolutely ridiculous i know but this merchandise is not available for much longer okay and i would hate for anyone

To miss out on chuffed bits t-shirts and chafter bits hoodies and 12 bamboo hoodies and t-shirts and everything like that you know just just get it while it’s available and have fun with it enjoy