Hopper blocks are easy and cheap to craft, just one chest placed in the middle of five smoothstone blocks. For those of you who haven’t crafted smoothstone in a while, you can make smoothstone by putting cobblestone into the furnace and smelting it for a time.

Future minecraft updates will include a new decorative block, the Quartz Block. Quartz comes in three types thus far, striped quartz, a pattern reminiscent of Aztec / Mayan styles and a plain block for those of us who don’t want to get too fancy with our fanciness.

Source

The new daylight sensing block, which can tell whether it is being hit by light, has been used to create a passage that only opens in moonlight at midnight, inspired by the Lord of the Rings Mellon passage. Check out the video!

Five Uses For The New Minecraft Daylight Sensor

Traps!

If a door is opened, allowing light into your base, then a daylight sensor block can trigger a redstone current that will in turn trigger a dispenser or ten full of arrows.

Light / Time Sensitive Doors

See the video above 🙂

Night Lights

If a redstone Not gate is connected to the daylight sensor, the polarity will be reversed and the daylight sensor will emit a redstone charge when it is dark. Here’s a link to a one minute long video that teaches you how to make a redstone inverter, or NOT gate. This will enable you to have a city that never sleeps, with street lights activating at dusk and turning off at dawn.

Rain Sensor / Barometer

The light sensor is sensitive to the cloudy weather that is associated with rain, so you can use a day light sensor to create a rain warning system, which could very well prevent accidental exposure to lightning strikes.

City Gates

If you’re creating a medieval city, you can create a redstone operated gate that opens in the day time and closes at night, just as was done in the days of yore.

How To Craft A Daylight Sensor

The daylight sensor can be made using three glass blocks, three pieces of nether quartz (another new item) and three wooden slabs, all placed in horizontal lines along the crafting grid.

The hopper block is possibly the most exciting new minecraft block since the piston, as it adds a new mechanic to the game. Mob grinders and farms can now be automated, as the hopper block collects items that fall into it.

You can collect items from the hopper by right clicking it. The hopper has five slots and can therefore collect five different stacks of items before it needs to be cleared.

This is still a work in progress, linked to Minecraft Snapshot 13w01b. We can expect to see the hopper optimized in the future, for the moment operation is fairly messy. Unlike other minecraft mechanic blocks, hoppers do not need to be redstone activated to work.

Wormhole Survival is a classic skyblock style minecraft survival map – with a twist. See all those islands in the teaser picture? Think you can just build yourself a cobblestone bridge between them all and call it a day? No I say unto you, nay! The only way to reach the various islands is to be teleported between them. Doesn’t sound too bad so far, right?

Wrong!

Unfortunately for you, you’ll be teleported at random whenever the map decides that it has had enough of you being in one particular spot. This means that you can’t simply build a cosy little base, farm some wheat and declare the map finished, because no sooner have you made your first loaf of bread than you’ll find yourself on another island entirely, with no resources besides the ones in your deep minecraft pockets. This adds a definite edge to the game of minecraft survival and more than that it is a truly original minecraft survival map. I bolded that because originality becomes rarer the further we go along.

Every sunset and sunrise, you’ll find yourself being ripped away from whatever you know and teleported to a new biome. There you must survive, collect resources and hope that your next trip in ten minutes or so takes you somewhere nice. If you’re low on health and you end up in the ‘bedrock and a piece of ice’ biome, you’ll be in trouble. This is, for obvious reasons, a very exciting new minecraft survival map.

Click here to check out, camp out and download Wormhole Survival!