Redstone changes Minecraft at a fundamental level. In this video, I look at what makes Redstone tick and why it’s so special.
Transcript:
What would your Minecraft world look like without redstone?
Would you just lose simple furnace array? Or would your base be completely empty without it?
I’m here to take you on a journey. A journey to understand how redstone shapes the game. And what Minecraft would be like without it.
To give the simplest of overviews for people unfamiliar with redstone, it’s basically electricity in Minecraft. You send signals to objects and those objects react. Flip a switch and turn on a light, simple as that.
Well uhh… It CAN be as simple as that. It can also be as complex as this.
The point is, there’s a lot of stuff you can do in between those two extremes. You could get a little bit more complex than building a simple light switch or a little less complex than a full-on computer. It’s up to you to decide how deep you want to go.
And that freedom is important. If there was some endgame where you NEEDED to build massive contraptions to progress, the designers would be alienating people who just like to build nice houses. And if there’s anything I can say about Mojang’s target audience, its that they want to appeal to as many people as possible.
Let’s take a look at how redstone is integrated with the intended progression through the game.
Since redstone ore is located deep underground, you might think the player will first interact with the redstone system once they go that deep looking for diamonds. But that’s not necessarily true, all kinds of redstone components are available right off the bat.
Something I always used to do in my base, was place a wooden pressure plate right next to my front door on the inside. That way, if I’m leaving my base, I can just walk out without having to click to open the door. And if I’m walking in, I only have to click the door once. After I step on the pressure plate inside, the door closes.
There’s no redstone ore anywhere, but the door is still receiving a redstone signal. The pressure plate is directly powering the door. I could push the input and output further apart with redstone ore if I wanted, but for something as simple as that use case, there’s no reason to.
Don’t get me wrong, the player is limited in what they can do at this point, but there’s still options.
Once you do start digging down deep enough to find redstone, hooo boy, a lot opens up.
Pistons, hoppers, observers, the sky’s the limit.
There’s an abundance of both items that can send power and receive power. They’re all useful in their own little circumstances.
Here’s where it gets complicated.
Every redstone project starts with a goal. Build a super smelter. Build a piston door for your base. Set up an automatic item sorter. Plans are easy to make. It’s the execution of the plan that’s the hard part.
Saying you want a piston door is cool and all. But do you know how to build one? Have you even crafted a sticky piston before? A couple years ago, I crafted a sticky piston, and realized that it was the first time I’d ever done that in a survival world. I’ve been playing the game for nearly a decade, but I never really interacted with that side of redstone.
Every player has that moment. They might have had some experience doing some hopper stuff for furnaces or mob farms, but once you start delving into pistons and repeater timing, it’s like a whole other world.
Through that lack of knowledge, you probably aren’t able to build a piston door like you wanted. Maybe you could do a cool 2 by 1, but you were hoping to make a 2 by 2 that retracts backwards, then into the wall.
So you do what any eager-to-learn gamer would do. You go to YouTube.
You learn about repeater timings, then you learn about OR gates, hopper clocks, it’s so easy to fall down the rabbit hole. There’s a ton of great creators out there making amazing content, explaining complex systems in a concise way that anyone could understand.
But what does that say about the game’s design?
Is it a good thing that the player needs to head outside of the game to learn how some of the more complex items work, even on a fundamental level?
Look… I’m gonna be vulnerable here and admit something. Something I’m ashamed to say as someone who’s played probably a thousand hours of Minecraft over the past decade.
I have no idea how a Redstone Comparator works. I know it compares signals, but I don’t know how, and at this point I’m too afraid to ask.
Should I be expected to look up how that item works online? How most redstone components work is self-evident. The dropper drops stuff, the daylight detector detects daylight, you get the idea. Is the game harmed by having more complex items and mechanics that aren’t explained so well in-game?
I think it’s fine.
Like I said earlier, as long as progression isn’t halted by a mechanic that isn’t explained well, then I think it’s fine to have the more complex stuff. Even the components that seems simple, like a piston, have a ton of complexity to them. A player who just wants to make a simple 2×1 piston door for their base won’t need to worry about the piston block push limit, slime blocks, all that jazz. It works for their simple project and that’s all they need to know. And if they did want to know more, Google is a couple clicks away.
So what does redstone do for Minecraft? I’ve went over some of the stuff it CAN do, but HOW does it affect the game as a whole?
I think the most important way it affects the game, is that it increases the scale.
Think about how you interact with a brand new world. You punch trees to get a couple planks, kill some cows for their food, mine a handful of iron. You’re making ends meet with what you have.
Now think about what your world looks like 100 hours in. Or maybe if you haven’t played a world that long, think of your average Let’s Play-er. Think of how they’re playing the game 100 hours, 200 hours in. They’re building massive automatic farms. They don’t need to kill cows for food anymore, they have some inhumane cow killer machine that does it for them. They have 6 iron golem farms to give them all the iron they’d ever need. They’re interacting with the game in a fundamentally different way on day 3452 than on day 1.
Redstone components and redstone power are the key to almost every farm. TNT dupers are needed for tree farms, moss generators are a mess of redstone, and hell, you can even get redstone itself from a witch farm.
It’s present in nearly every complex machine and supplies the materials for massive aesthetic builds. Redstone is at the core of late game Minecraft.
So what would Minecraft be like without it?
No redstone power means no hoppers. Without hoppers, a lot of mob grinders COULD still be ran, but it’d need to be done by hand. You’d have to be at the Iron Farm when the Iron Golem is killed to pick up the Iron it drops, then deposit it into a chest when your inventory is filled up.
Without hoppers, smelting is a pain. You have to fill each furnace individually, and depending on how many blocks you need smelted, you could be in for some serious shift clicking.
Without hoppers, item sorting systems are extremely limited. While not everyone needs a massively complex item sorter, the type of person to build one likely really needs it. And they would be MASSIVELY inconvenienced without hoppers.
No redstone means no pistons. Crazy entrances are no longer possible for your base, you either use a wooden door or nothing at all. And no more fun traps to design for your friends.
No redstone means no technical community. So much of Minecraft’s success on Youtube is due to the crazy redstone contraptions people will make and show off. Without that system, those people would either be talking about other aspects of the game, talking about another game that better fits them, or they just wouldn’t be on YouTube at all.
All of that said, removing redstone from Minecraft today would be an unmitigated disaster. But that’s a given. I wanna take another perspective. I wanna imagine a Minecraft that never had redstone.
Simply put, it’d be the same game, just on a smaller scale. Someone using a TNT duper flying machine to blow up like 500 chunks would be unimaginable. You’d have to do it the old-fashioned way. Grab a couple pickaxes and get digging.
If I’m being honest, for a lot of people out there, the game wouldn’t change much at all. There’s probably a portion of the community that doesn’t interact with any redstone components at all. If redstone stuff didn’t exist, they’d still be building quaint little houses and exploring their world for fun like they do today.
It would really only drastically effect the technical community. One would still probably exist, but it’d look very different. People would still be trying to push the boundaries of the game. There’d still be a SciCraft around trying to collect some amount of every block in the game. Maybe not a double chest, but my point is, those players are always gonna be around.
It’s just that the ceiling they can reach is much lower.
There’s these concepts in multiplayer games called the skill floor and the skill ceiling. A game with a low skill floor is something that’s easily accessible for anyone to play starting out. The mechanics are easy to understand at a glance and while someone just starting out won’t necessarily win, they feel like they’re welcome. A high skill floor means there’s a barrier to entry. Base mechanics are complex and it takes time to just get the ball rolling.
A high skill ceiling means there’s a lot for players to do at very high skill levels. There’s a ton of different mechanics with insane depth that allow for a lot of creativity. And a low skill ceiling means that high level play is very limited.
The interesting part is the valley between the skill floor and the skill ceiling. Minecraft is in a pretty unique spot where the skill floor is insanely low, but the skill ceiling is astronomically high. The barrier to entry to just get in the game and have fun is practically non-existent. Keep in mind, young children are part of Mojang’s target audience.
But the skill ceiling is really high. People will build farms that produce hundreds of thousands of items just to push existing systems in the game to their absolute limit.
That’s the beauty of Minecraft. It can appeal to both types of players. The game can serve both the people that just want to build houses with their friends and the people that wipe out chunks to make their farms 5% more efficient.
Redstone raises the skill ceiling of Minecraft. It opens the game to a wider audience and gives everyone the freedom to play how they want.
And if you like a game with options, check out this video of me talking about The Elder Scrolls 2 and how I think they’ll be pulling from it for Starfield and The Elder Scrolls 6. Those games are gonna blow Skyrim out of the water in terms of player agency. At least it would if I had my way.
See ya next time.