Block of the Month: Trapped Chest

Trapped chests act almost exactly like a regular chest too. Open the lid, put some things in, and close it up again. You can even place two trapped chests side-by-side to make a big one, just like a regular chest. When you open the lid, though, that’s when things get interesting. A trapped chest that is accessed by a player will send out a pulse that activates any nearby redstone components. The more players accessing it at the same time, the stronger the pulse.

Some of you that are reading will already be thinking of the potential fun you could have with this. To make one, combine a chest with a tripwire hook. Then you could set up an alarm system that rings if your storage is accessed by other players on your server. Set up a lock on your doors when you’re browsing your chests so that a zombie doesn’t sneak up on you. Or, if you need to get back at a friend after they played a practical joke on you, creep into structures close to their house and replace the loot chests with trapped chests attached to TNT. Boom!

If you do successfully spot a trap before it triggers, you have a couple of options. First, just don’t open the chest. Leave it be and go on with your life. There’ll always be more chests. Second, you can carefully investigate the area around the chest, uncovering any mechanism attached and carefully defusing it. Lastly, you can just break the chest and take its contents that way, though you may want to replace it afterwards to hide your tracks.

There are all kinds of real-world equivalents to Minecraft’s trapped chests. In a pirate movie, a captain might rig up her buried loot with a clockwork mechanism that triggers when opened. In a fantasy novel, a wizard might cast a spell on their possessions, causing a magical alarm to sound if they’re stolen.

There are plenty of real-world security locks like this too. Many modern safes have alarms that go off if people try to access them improperly. Some smart locks can alert the owner when someone tries to tamper with it, or if the wrong code is entered too many times.

With all of these examples, the same advice applies as in Minecraft: be careful of opening things that aren’t yours. You never quite know what might happen if you do.