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Redstone is Minecraft's version of electricity, and has been a part of the game since the very beginning. By using redstone in your builds, you can take a build that looks great on the outside and make it "smart" on the inside! Let's get into the very basics of using this powerful tool.

Let's start with a simple example. Place down an iron door and frame it with a type of solid block such as cobblestone or dirt, then mount a lever on the wall next to it. Iron doors are a special variety - normally players can't open iron doors like they can with other types of doors, so they have to be opened using redstone power instead. When you pull the lever, the door opens like magic!

The lever is a redstone power source - when it's flipped into the on position, it begins to produce redstone power which can then power any redstone mechanisms that are next to it, such as the iron door. Because the redstone power travels from the lever to the iron door, the door opens.

There are many different kinds of power sources, from buttons to pressure plates to more complex sensors like the observer block. There are also many kinds of mechanisms you can activate, like pistons, redstone lamps, and TNT. There are even some blocks that are a power source and a mechanism at the same time, like hoppers. Because of this, there are tons of different possible circuits you can build, so the possibilities are endless!

Redstone operates on a set of rules, and if you understand the rules you can figure out problems in your circuits and fix them in a snap. Here's the first redstone rule, based on what we learned from the doorway we just built:

As we go, we'll get into further detail about there rules, and there'll be a cheatsheet at the end you can refer to if you forget any.

Sometimes you find yourself in a situation where, unlike with our iron door example, you want your power source to activate a mechanism that isn't right next to it. In that case, we need to use redstone dust to transfer the power to its destination. Let's change our build so that the door can be powered from further away.

Remove the lever that you placed next to the door, then walk a few blocks away and place it down on the ground. Use redstone dust to create a path that begins at the lever and ends pointing at your doorway. Flip the lever once more, and your door should open again! Notice that, when the power source is activated, the redstone dust glows red to demonstrate that power is traveling through it.

Depending on how your redstone wire is laid out, it might not be working properly. This brings us to our new redstone rule:

This means that it isn't enough for the powered redstone dust to be next to the door; you need to visually see the trail leading right up to the door itself. Here are a couple of pictures that show this rule in action:

Having a trail of redstone going straight to our door works fine, but it's not ideal - not only is it an eyesore but it also leaves the potential for the circuit to be broken by mistake. A better way to do this would be to hide the wiring completely and indirectly power the door by using the next redstone rule:

In this example, notice how the redstone dust leads into a normal stone block, and in turn that stone block can activate the redstone lamps. You can see that, though there are seven redstone lamps connected together, only the ones adjacent to the stone brick will be powered.

Our iron door can be powered in the exact same way. Create a path of redstone dust leading from your lever to one of the blocks next to the door. When you activate the lever, the door will open even though no redstone is directly connected to it!

There are some small limitations to this. For example, not all solid blocks are able to power neighboring mechanisms this way. Otherwise, this is a reliable way to power things without needing to run a trail of dust right up to them.

Everything we've learned so far works great if we're building flat circuits, but what if we want redstone power to be transferred to higher or lower blocks? That's where our next rule comes in handy:

Take a look at these two examples. The left one shows that the redstone path leads up the sides of these blocks and powers the redstone lamp at the top. However, if a nearby block's edge gets in the way, like you can see in the right image, that will break the path and power will no longer transfer.

This also works with slabs, which can be placed in a way that won't obstruct the wire. Because of this, you can use a zigzag of slabs to transfer redstone power up or down while using a very small amount of space. This opens up tons of options, like using a power source placed outside to activate a mechanism in an underground tunnel.

Now that we know redstone dust can establish paths up and down, we can now talk about the last redstone rule, which is almost one of the most useful:

This rule allows us to simplify our circuits dramatically. As an example, let's say we have three redstone lamps at different heights like you see in the picture to the right, and we want to power them all as part of the same circuit. How could we do that?

One approach would be to use a "staircase" of blocks like we discussed in the previous section, and then run redstone dust to each of the lamps to power them. This works but requires us to use a lot of extra blocks to get the power where we want it to go.

We can do better, though. Because redstone dust can power blocks it is laid on top of, we can actually make a single staircase of blocks and run the dust directly over the lamps to power all of them with one dust trail. The result is that our circuit is much more compact and uses fewer blocks!

Let's recap all the redstone rules we've learned, written in a more simple form:

These rules aren't universal, and in a game with as much complexity as Minecraft you will sometimes find exceptions, but generally they should be very helpful when it comes to deciding how to arrange circuits in your builds.

If you'd like to find out more about redstone and ways you can use specific power sources or mechanisms, check out some of our other tutorials and take your skills to the next level!

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