In Minecraft, moving things from chest to chest is super tedious and time-consuming. Essentially, it involves emptying your inventory and then transferring all the items from one chest to your inventory and then to the next chest. It sucks! Mods make this easier with the addition of pipes and similar items, however, those don’t work for Vanilla. Today, we’re going to look at the Vanilla solution made for this problem, Hoppers! We’re going to go over how they work, how to make them, and more. Let’s begin.
How to make Hoppers
The Hopper crafting recipe is quite cheap. All you’ll need to do is gather a little bit of Iron and some wood to make a chest. If you want multiple hoppers to create a sort of chain, or multiple projects, be sure to gather lots of Iron.
Next, simply place the Iron and Chest into a crafting table in the following pattern.
5 Iron
1 Chest
Hopper Functionality
A Hopper is a block that can be used to catch item entities, or to transfer items into and out of containers. A container could be a chest, barrel, or any block that holds items. The hopper can be used as a container, crafting ingredient, and a Redstone component.
In the image above, you can see the simplest version of an auto-smelter. It has the ore being fed into the Furnace through the top, fuel being pushed into the side, and an output chest that collects all the smelted ore. It’s quite well made! Hoppers have an “output” tube at the bottom of its model that can face down or sideways and provides a visual indication of which block the hopper is set up to drop its items into, if that block has an inventory. Simply place the hopper while aiming at the surface to which its output should face (Hoppers don’t orient themselves automatically). To do this, you’ll need to sneak while placing the hopper.
Hoppers actually can receive a Redstone signal. When it does, all three functions cease. (note how the item in the image above will float on top of a locked hopper rather than being picked up) Powered Hoppers can best be described as ‘locked’ and unpowered hoppers can be described as being ‘unlocked.’ While a locked hopper does not push or pull/collect items, it may still receive items from dispensers, droppers, and other hoppers, and may have its items pulled out by another hopper beneath it. Hence, the item flow in a horizontal hopper pipe may be stopped by locking just one of the hoppers, but stopping a vertical hopper pipe requires locking two adjacent hoppers at the same time, such that both the pushing of the top one and the pulling of the bottom one are stopped. Hoppers can also be moved by pistons, despite not being a solid block.
All Containers
This is a comprehensive list of all the containers that a hopper can pull items from.
Composter
Brewing Stand
Chest
Trapped Chest
Furnace
Blast Furnace
Smoker
Hopper
Minecart with Chest
Minecart with Hopper
Jukebox
Shulker Box
Lectern
Barrel
Dispenser
Dropper
Boat with Chest
Conclusion
That’s all there is to it! The Hopper is a fairly complex block that acts as the Vanilla implementation of features from Tekkit and Voltz that people have wanted for years. In any case, it’s an incredibly intuitive block that can be used in many ways, and it is definitely a fan favorite. Huge thanks to the Minecraft wiki, as I would never have understood the mechanics of this block on my own. I hope you all learned something new, and have a great day!
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