Block of the Month: Hopper

To make a hopper, put a chest in the middle of a crafting grid, and then make a kind of hopper-y shape around it with five iron ingots – two on each side and one below. Somehow this works. Then you can place in the world with the use key.

By default, a hopper will suck up any items that fall on it from above, storing them in its five-stack inventory. That’s cool and all, but the magic comes when you place it next to another container – a chest or any other block that can contain items. If that container is below the hopper, any items that it sucks up will be placed into the container. If the container is above the hopper, then the hopper will suck items out of it. 

You can probably already imagine having a chest above a furnace, which contains everything you want to smelt, another chest below to collect the smelted ingots. And two hoppers in between. But it gets even cooler. By sneaking when you place a hopper, you can also attach one to the side of a container, allowing you to have a second chest containing coal to fuel the furnace. Now your whole smelting operation is automated!

You want to know the coolest thing? Hoppers can pull from and deposit items into other hoppers. So it’s possible to build long chains of pipes to bring things from one place to another. They also work with jukeboxes, compostors, brewing stands, chiseled bookshelves, dispensers, droppers, decorated pots, and more.

One last hopper tip. If you want to temporarily pause a hopper’s operation without dismantling a whole build, you can apply a redstone signal to it. This causes the hopper to become locked. A locked hopper will not collect, pull, or push any items until the redstone signal is turned off again. Very handy for setting up a system before running large numbers of items through it.

In the real world, “hopper” is a term used to refer to a storage container within a mechanical system that collects and transfers materials that flow, like sand, dust, gravel, nuts, or seeds. Just like in Minecraft, hoppers tend to be shaped like upside-down pyramids or cones so that they can hold large amounts of materials until they’re needed while restricting the rate at which they pass through machinery.

There are a few tricky things that people who manage real-world hoppers have to deal with. First, they can get easily clogged up – especially when there’s moisture in the material. To avoid this, sometimes the bottom part of the container is heated to keep things dry. Secondly, the weight of the material inside can compact it – avoiding this usually means installing vibrators on the outer walls to shake things up.

Luckily, in Minecraft, hoppers just work – you don’t need to install heaters or vibrators or anything else. So go wild with hoppers, and come up with a time-saving solution that the world has never seen before!