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.
Villagers used to be almost entirely useless, but with the introduction of the emerald trading system, villagers have become an integral part of the minecraft economy. It’s easy enough to corral your villagers into stalls (because of their tendency to cluster in small, but desirable buildings with all the glee of cows heading off to slaughter). Unfortunately it is this very habit that makes creating a charming village with villagers actually living in each of your hand-built houses, all the harder. (more…)
This simple redstone firework display is created using repeaters, redstone wire and dispensers. The redstone repeater has three different settings, so you can adjust it in order to change the timing of your fireworks display. Please note, redstone repeaters are directional minecraft items, if you put the ‘current’ as it were, in the wrong end, they won’t do anything. So if you’ve tried to make something with a redstone repeater and the repeater doesn’t light up, that’s probably your problem.
A dispenser will fire one minecraft firework into the air with every redstone pulse. Having a series of dispensers linked together with repeaters and redstone as in the image above allows you to have a timed release of fireworks.
