Taking Inventory: Redstone Dust

Got some? Great! Let’s walk you through how it works. First, drop a little pile on the floor. In most situations, leaving big piles of dust all over the floor is not a good idea, but in Minecraft that’s not true. Drop another pile next to it, and you’ll see it forms into a straight line. Keep dropping and you can make a line going from one place to another. 

Now put a pressure plate on one end of your line, and step on the plate. You see how the redstone lights up? That indicates that it’s transferring a signal, which can travel up to 15 blocks, and even go up and down slopes. Put something on the other end – a door, perhaps, or a redstone lamp, or a note block. Stepping on the plate will then cause that object to activate. That’s just a starting point – you can go much deeper. Consult our online redstone guide, or the official Minecraft: Guide to Redstone book if you want to find out more.

Don’t use up all of your redstone on circuits immediately though – it has a few other uses. It’s commonly seen in recipes for crafting machines. It can be used in smithing for a lovely red armor trim. And it’s important in brewing to extend the duration of potions.

Outside of Minecraft, the job done by redstone dust in transmitting power and signals from one place to another is instead usually performed by wires and cables. Wires have been around for thousands of years, but they only began to be used for signal and power transfer after electricity began to be studied in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

Today, you are almost certainly reading this on some device that’s made largely of cables, connected up by cables to other devices, which themselves are made of cables. You’ll notice, when you start looking, that cables are everywhere. Some of those cables are teeny-tiny. Some are huge. Some are short. Some reach across oceans. Without cables, the world would not function how it does.

In recent decades, though, we’ve begun to develop wireless technologies. It’s now easy, and common, to transmit signals wirelessly – and it’s even possible to transfer power short distances too. So if you’re reading this in 100 years, it might be that cables are as much of a thing of the past for you as gas-powered lamps are to us today. Drop us an email (if it still exists) and let us know what we can expect to see – tellusaboutthefuture[a]mojang.com.