The Ultimate Guide to Mastering Circuit Power!: Minecraft® Redstone and the Keys to Supercharging Your Builds in Sandbox Games
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The Ultimate Guide to Mastering Circuit Power! - Triumph Books
Introduction
Do you like Minecraft? Do you think it would be cool control electricity? Have you ever wondered how a computer works? Would you like to design and build worlds that move and interact however you’d like them to?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you would undoubtedly enjoy the powerful world of Redstone.
Redstone is a special system of power and mechanisms that is part of the world’s most popular video game, Minecraft. Essentially, Redstone simulates a (slightly) simplified version of real-life electricity, which players of Minecraft can use to power infinite creations of their own designs. These creations can do just about anything you could want in the game of Minecraft, from reducing previously tedious tasks like farming and hunting into things that happen at the push of a button, to creating devastating player-vs-player weapons, to even virtually simulating massively complex real-life electronic machines such as computers.
From concise and useful builds like the hidden tree door on the left to the monster, super-complex, fun builds like the piano on the right, Redstone is a fascinating material with near infinite uses.
Redstone is, to be blunt, the most powerful and creative tool ever created inside of a video game. Learning how to use Redstone is not only what separates a well-versed Minecraft player from a true expert, it’s also just a step away from learning how electrical engineering works in reality. In fact, as a system that relies on rules grounded in the real-world concepts of logic and electrical systems, Redstone is a system that is both incredibly fun to learn, and which will seriously stretch the brain of anyone who takes the time to dive into it and learn its mighty secrets.
And that’s where this book comes in. As a system whose basic rules are simple, but which is certainly one of the hardest things to learn in all of video games, Redstone engineering is quite intimidating when you first come across it. This book is here to show you that not only is learning Redstone possible for any video game player out there, it’s also a heck of a lot of fun, and something which you can start learning in just a few minutes.
That being said, becoming a true master Redstone engineer who can craft up mind-boggling works of mechanical and logical genius is a task that takes time, dedication, and not just a little bit of trial-and-error. With this book, however, we’re going to start you off on the path to Redstone mastery the right way, easing you into the subject and teaching you all of the tricks and lessons of the great Redstone creators so that, by the end, you’ll be well on your way to creating such awesome constructs as slick automatic doors, devastating rapid-fire scattershot TNT and, yes, even simulations of actual computer systems inside of a video game.
It’s an epic task, but one that’s guaranteed to leave you smarter, not to mention turning you into the best Minecraft player of anyone you know.
If you’re ready to start thinking in a new way and to begin to control the fabric of the virtual world of Minecraft, turn these pages and start getting familiar with Redstone- the most powerful and complex system that ever existed inside a video game.
The Basics
Ready to start your journey to becoming a master of all that is Redstone? Well then, let’s dive right on in and get familiar with the basics of the Redstone world!
Before we do so, however, let’s talk for a moment about how to best use this book to get the most out of it and to become the most knowledgable Redstone engineer you can:
How to Use This Book
Redstone is a massive topic, almost infinitely so because there are always players finding new ways to use it, and also because it often gets updated when Minecraft itself gets an update. This book is not meant to contain every single piece of information about Redstone, as that would be impossible, at the worst, or require a book that was a few thousand pages longer at best.
What this book is meant to do is to give you all of the basic information you need to begin learning how to use Redstone in the easiest and most pain-free way we can teach it to you. We want to make Redstone fun and inviting, and to dispel the air of intimidation and difficulty that often surrounds the subject.
We’ll take you from the very most basic concepts of Redstone, starting here in this chapter, and as we go through the book, we’ll add a little more with each chapter, stopping along the way to test out the ideas we present with some fun builds and cool applications.
We suggest that you approach this book from one end to the other, working through each chapter in turn and learning its lessons before moving on to the next. By the end of the book, we’ll have you building some pretty highly advanced Redstone constructions and starting to think like a real Redstone engineer!
That being said, these concepts are also very complex, and there’s a lot of information to internalize, so we’d also make one more suggestion for how to have the best and most successful Redstone learning experience:
Don’t worry about getting it all perfect. Even the best Redstone engineers out there took a long time to understand and memorize this information, and there’s no rush to do so. The best way to learn Redstone is to read through this book and test out the different builds, and then to just keep messing around with the stuff, referring back to the book when you need to know something. Over time, you’ll start to naturally remember the nitty gritty details of Redstone items, rules and concepts without having to look them up, so there’s no need to get discouraged if you keep having to look back at the book as you go.
In fact, we’d even suggest seeking out more resources on Redstone as well, such as watching videos online or finding other players to learn from. This book is meant to be your introduction to the world of Redstone and a handy reference guide, but we won’t have our feelings hurt if you need to seek out a little extra help! The goal here is to help you learn Redstone, and we are simply trying give you as many resources in these pages as possible to help you do that.
One final note before we get going: Almost everything we talk about in this book assumes that you are playing in Creative Mode. This is because the builds take very, very many items of different types, and while you might have them in your Survival World, they will be pretty expensive. Additionally, Creative Mode allows you to fly and to turn off hostile mobs, allowing you to be able to learn in peace. We can’t suggest doing this enough to learn Redstone’s rules. Additionally, this book is primarily focused on the full version of Minecraft as it is on the PC and Mac. This is because the console versions do not contain all Redstone items quite yet, but they are being updated frequently. If you are playing on a console, you’ll have to wait to try some of these concepts until the updates happen, but the basic rules and many of the builds are still the same and will work.
With that in mind, let’s get into this!
The Concept
In a nutshell, Redstone is a system that uses power signals to cause something to happen in the game of Minecraft. This something
could be as simple as opening a Door or turning on a light, or it could be something a bit more complex like causing a mechanism such as a Piston to activate and interact with the world, or it could be as complex as causing a mini-game to begin. A simple Redstone power signal can even cause something as intricate and massive as a player-built Redstone simulation of a computer to turn on and function!
Redstone power is somewhat like real-life electricity, and thinking of it like this is very useful, especially when first starting out with the stuff. Here are the ways in which Redstone and real-world electricity are similar:
Redstone has an ON state and an OFF state.
Redstone signals can have various levels of power, in the case of Redstone it goes from 0-15.
Redstone signals can be carried through a Minecraft world through items called Redstone Dust (as well as others) that are very similar to real-life wires.
A powered Redstone signal that is wired
up so that it runs into certain items in the game called mechanisms
will give those mechanisms power and cause them to activate.
Redstone can be used to build circuits
that function in much the same way as real-life circuits function in computers and other electronics.
There are, however, quite a few ways in which Redstone and normal electricity differ, and they are equally important:
The power that Redstone builds use is not always held in a storage unit like a battery, or piped through from the outside, but is instead almost always created by the items that toggle the power ON and OFF. To further explain the difference, a real-world light switch controls electric power, but it does not create the power. In Minecraft, Levers, which are very similar in look to light-switches, can control Redstone power, but they also create that power themselves. Redstone items that create power are called power components,
and there are many types of these, including two that do act somewhat like a battery and/or permanent power source (Redstone Torches and Blocks of Redstone).
Redstone power signals only go 15 blocks in one direction before their power signal fades away. To get it to go farther, it must be boosted. This is actually similar to real electricity, except that the rules that govern the distance of real electric signals are far more complex.
Redstone signals can and often are influenced by the passage of time. This is also actually similar to real electricity, but again there is a major difference. This time the difference is that the time delays on real electricity are often so fast that we do not even recognize them, while in Redstone this is essentially slowed way down so that players can manipulate and use these delays. Time in Redstone is measured in ticks,
where each a tick happens 10 times a second, or once every 0.1 seconds in real time. Redstone components and mechanisms update their status every tick, checking to see if their inputs have changed in any way, and when the input does change, they respond by activating, deactivating or performing a special action. Note: time in the rest of Minecraft also operates on ticks,
but a regular Minecraft ticks happen 20 times a second, making them twice as fast. This often confuses players who are aware of regular Minecraft ticks, so it’s a good idea to note the difference here. Additionally, when we refer to ticks
from here on out in this book, we are referring exclusively to Redstone ticks.
When you know how to use these and the many other rules of Redstone together, you will be able to build incredible contraptions and systems, and the range of things you can do in everyone’s favorite builder game expands in a huge way. In fact, Redstone is considered by many players to be the pinnacle of Minecraft knowledge, and many of the things that people build in the game that will cause less-experienced players to scratch their head and wonder how it even happened are made with Redstone.
The Components
Redstone is possible because of certain items and blocks in the game and the way they work together. In the next chapter, we’ll look at each and every one of these very closely and give you all the details of how they work and what they’re used in, but for now let’s break the various Redstone components down into their most simple forms and talk about how they relate.
All Redstone items fall into one of the following categories:
Power & control components (usually just referred to as power components)
Transmission components
Mechanisms
Basic blocks
Rails and Rail-related items
Other items that interact with Redstone
In its most simple form, a Redstone build will have a power component and a mechanism, but most Redstone builds use items from at least three of these categories, and some can even use many items from all of these categories.
Let’s take a second to get the basics of how the first three of these components interact with each other set in our minds. A typical simple Redstone build starts with a