How To Make A Hopper In Minecraft: A Complete Guide

Hoppers are some of the most useful blocks when it comes to transporting items. If you ever want an efficient storage system or automatic machines, hoppers are a must-have. This guide will show you how to craft and use a hopper.

Minecraft Crafting Recipe for Hoppers

Crafting a Hopper

The crafting recipe of a hopper requires the items listed below:

• Crafting Table
• 5x Iron Ingots
• 1x Wooden Chest

Iron ingots can be obtained by mining iron ore. You can find iron ore easily in caves and underground. After mining the iron ore, put the iron ore in a furnace and smelt it to obtain an iron ingot.

If you haven’t crafted a wooden chest yet, you will need eight wooden planks. First, right-click the crafting table. There should be a 3 x 3 crafting area on the top left side after you right-click it. Place the wooden planks inside the 3×3 crafting area in exactly this order and make sure you leave the center square blank:

After you have finished collecting the resources, place the items in the crafting grid in this exact pattern:

Make sure you have the correct pattern or you won’t be able to craft a hopper.

How to Use a Hopper

Hoppers are useful for moving items, building automatic farms and much more. But to create more complex systems, you must first understand how a hopper works.

Hopper Inventory

Hoppers have a container attached to them after they are crafted, meaning the hopper essentially has its own inventory. To access the hopper inventory, right-click a hopper and the inventory should be at the top. A hopper’s inventory has up to 5 spaces it can hold:

How Hoppers Collect Items

Hoppers collect any item entity that is dropped on the top of the block. However, if there is a solid block on the top of the hopper, the item is unable to pass through and be dropped into the hopper. Hoppers collect items from the leftmost slot to the rightmost slot. The hopper can also pull items from other blocks (e.g. chests, furnaces). The hopper can’t collect any items if the inventory is full. For example, the picture above has a hopper filled with chests, meaning that it can’t collect any more items.

Hopper Funnel Direction

A hopper also has a hopper funnel that can move items to or from other containers. You can connect a hopper directly down or sideways. If you are trying to connect the hopper to containers, you might have the problem of opening the containers instead of putting the hopper down. To solve this, make sure to crouch before placing the hopper down. To change the direction of the hopper funnel, place the hopper against the side where you want the funnel to face. If you look closely at a hopper, they have output tubes at the bottom of the block to indicate which way the hopper will drop items.

If you place hoppers next to each other, you can connect the hoppers together and create a large funnel to a container directly. These hoppers form a hopper chain, pushing items into or pulling items from other hoppers. Make sure you always crouch first before placing or else the hoppers won’t connect.

Hopper, Machines, and Redstone

Because of the way a hopper works, there ends up being many creative solutions to creating machines in Minecraft. Below are some examples:

Automatic Furnace Station

To create an automatic furnace station, we are going to need:

• 2x Hoppers
• 2x Chests

The first hopper is the one feeding the furnace materials. Make sure that this hopper is directly above the furnace or else it won’t put the item into the furnace. The second hopper is the hopper that is taking the finished items from the furnaces. You can place this hopper in any direction. The first chest we will connect to the top hopper so that you can place the resources you want to burn inside it”. This chest will automatically drop resources into the top hopper. Then we connect the attached hopper that grabs items from the furnace and then transfers items into a final chest that will store all the processed ores or raw meat.

Hoppers and Redstone

Hoppers are considered active blocks, meaning that as long as you put an item in them and have a container attached to them, they will transfer items. However, what if you want to stop a hopper from transferring items temporarily? The process isn’t complicated and you don’t have to be a redstone whizkid to understand.

Active redstone signals usually activate machines, but if we activate a machine that is already active, the answer is that it will shut off the machine. Therefore, to stop the hopper from running, we give it a redstone signal. The example below uses redstone dust and a redstone torch to stop the bottom hopper from transferring items into the final chest.

Hoppers can also be used as a source for signal strength if we attach it to a redstone comparator. Have the redstone comparator face away from the hopper. The signal strength will then be determined by the amount of items the hopper has in its inventory. A completely full hopper can output up to a signal strength of up to 15 blocks.

Hoppers are essential if you want to create an organized storage space or automatic machines. If you have a problem or want to build something, there is a good chance that you will need hoppers to make the machine work.