Triumph Books (Firm) - Master builder power up! Level 2: Minecraft Redstone for intermediate players

Contents

Redstone Gates

What They Are and Why You Need to Know Em

Ready to have your brain busted? Well, unless youve already got a good bit of learnin accomplished in the fields of logic or computer programming/building (and we dont mean installing more memory into your PC, we mean the actual construction of those memory chips), chances are this section of our little guide is going to be a bit of a noggin-expander. But dont get your head all worried- we mean that in a good way!

What were tackling in this chapter are the ever-important, all-powerful Redstone gates. These little constructs are simple to build, yet are the hardest part of Redstone to master, and in the end theyre what allow most every Redstone build to work. They can be used in everything from a simple mob detection system (which uses a basic NOT gate or so), to the most mind-bogglingly complex Redstone computers that need an engineering degree to understand and build (and which use just about every single version of these gates that there is, and thousands of each).

So what the heck are Redstone gates?

The Deep Explanation

Well, this is actually quite a complex subject, especially for a video game. To start with, know that its not necessary to grasp the entirety of this concept right now as you read through this chapter. Like much of this book, the important part here is just to read the words over so that you get familiar with the ideas, and then to try and recreate the gates you see in the pictures so that you start using them yourself. Redstone gates are fascinating and are worth learning not only to get better at building in Minecraft, but also because even attempting to understand gates will make you smarter and will help you to learn how actual real-life things like computers and electronics function (which might even help you in a future job!).

But, even some very highly educated people struggle with these concepts, so dont worry about trying to understand the whole thing all at once. Understanding will come with time and practice, and besides, theres always something more to be learned about Redstone gates once you get the hang of all of this you see here.

To get on the right track and to start to understand what Redstone gates are, lets begin with two ideas:

Redstone gates are circuits built out of Redstone, very similar to the kind of circuits that make up the wiring in everything electronic in your home, from the somewhat simple wiring that goes through your home to all of its lights, to the incredibly complex wiring that makes up the circuits of the computer or console on which you play Minecraft. Redstone gates, like those circuits, take power signals and combine and manipulate these signals in order to achieve a specific result. For lights, this result means turning on. For Redstone gates, it can mean a variety of things, from causing a Piston to activate to powering the input to yet another Redstone gate.

This works like this: each gate (and each circuit in your electronics) takes these input signals and reads what they are, and then manipulates them based on how the gate (or circuit) is built, and then the gate (or circuit) outputs a new signal based on that manipulation. For real circuits, these outputs have a lot of variety, but for Minecrafts purposes, the output is either ON or OFF. This concept of ON or OFF leads us to our second idea for understanding Redstone gates.

2. Redstone gates are a way to create what are known in the world outside of Minecraft as logic gates, except you build them in the game. Though Redstone gates are often called circuits, and are very similar to electronic circuitry, it is actually a bit more useful and more apt to compare Redstone gates to the field of logic than to electronics. In logic, various combinations of ON inputs (also sometimes known as 1, A, or HIGH inputs) and OFF inputs (also known as 0, B, or LOW inputs) go into mental constructs known as logic gates that function in much the same way that Redstone gates do, except instead of having physical parts like Redstone Torches and Dust and blocks creating the gate (or real physical parts like actual wires, for electronic gates), the gate is all in the mind.

This may make Redstone gates seem more similar to electronic gates than logic gates, since they both require actual construction, but the truth is that electronics feature a lot more special rules than Redstone does, which have to do with the physical properties of wires and electricity. Redstone, on the other hand, is created in a virtual world with far fewer rules and restrictions, and which can be referred to as a simulation. Since creating and using logic gates inside your mind by thinking of them can also be thought of as a simulation, you can start to see why logic gates and Redstone gates have a lot in common.

What It Means for Minecraft

In the end, all this fancy talk and high theory doesnt mean much fun for your Minecraft world if you cant actually do anything with Redstone gates. But, since this is a video game, Redstone gates are primarily used to create really fun and/or impressive things in your Minecraft world such as hidden doors, traps, cool lighting rigs and even super complex things like working computers and most of the mini-games you play on Minecraft servers.

In the end, the easiest way to explain Redstone gates in Minecraft terms is to say that they are what allow all of the really complex Redstone builds to work. The end result might be that a pirate ship battle mini-game kicks off in full force, but what youre not seeing when this happens is all of the Redstone gates and logic concepts that are built into the behind-the-scenes that allow the pirate ships to function and do things.

Using Redstone gates is not just important to mastering Redstone, it may be the most important part of the whole field outside of simply knowing how the various Redstone items work. Its not something that almost anyone can understand right off the bat, but if you take the time to try out all of these gates and think about how they work, and how to use them, we promise you that youll come out the other side as a builder thats 100 times better at Redstone, if not more.

A Couple of Notes Before We Jump In

Before we start unleashing the mighty force of Redstone gate knowledge on your brains, a couple notes on what youre about to read:

The text for each gate explains how and why the gate works, and just gives a bit on how to build them. To actually build each gate yourself, simply copy what you see in the photos and diagrams. Make sure you do it exactly, or else the gates just wont work right. Youll know that you built it right if you get the same results in terms of turning the inputs ON and OFF as you see in the text below the title of each gate.