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...