Master Builder Power Up! Level 2: Minecraft®™ Redstone for Intermediate Players

By Triumph Books

Master Builder Power Up! Level 2 is perfect for Minecraft™ players with a basic knowledge of Redstone who are looking to increase their skills. Starting with an easy-to-understand explanation of Redstone gates and automation, Level 2 concludes with step-by-step instructions for intermediate builds that will test your skills and amaze your friends. Try your hand at building automatic double doors, a combination lock, a TNT cannon, and more in this intermediate guide to Redstone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Triumph Books
• Release date: Nov 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781633195394

Book preview

Contents

Redstone Gates

Automation

5 Intermediate Builds

Redstone Gates

What They Are and Why You Need to Know ‘Em

Ready to have your brain busted? Well, unless you’ve already got a good bit of learnin’ accomplished in the fields of logic or computer programming/building (and we don’t 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 don’t get your head all worried- we mean that in a good way!

What we’re 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 they’re 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 it’s 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 don’t worry about trying to understand the whole thing all at once. Understanding will come with time and practice, and besides, there’s 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, let’s begin with two ideas:

1. 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 Minecraft’s 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

Reviews for Master Builder Power Up! Level 2

[denis rowland · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

SOOOOOOOOO complicated and pretty short if you ask me