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Components

Building blocks: structure and storage

The opaque blocks that conduct power and anchor your build, the containers a comparator reads, and the slime and honey blocks that move under a piston.

Not every block carries logic. The Blocks group is the material your circuits are built on and around: solid conductors that pass power along and hold the rest of a mechanism in place, containers that store items and report how full they are, and movable blocks that drag their neighbors when a piston shoves them. Here is the group, grouped by job.

Structure and conduction

Solid blocks are the skeleton of a build — opaque, and able to carry power from one place to the next.

  • Solid Block — an opaque conductor. Strong power from an adjacent source (a torch below, a repeater aimed in) re-seeds every neighboring dust to that same 0–15 level, so a strongly powered block is what keeps an AND gate honest — it stops dust from leaking weak power off unpowered blocks. An observer watching a solid only detects whether the block exists; power changes on the block itself do not pulse it.

Containers a comparator can read

Containers hold items and expose their fill level as an analog signal. Place a comparator directly behind one and it reads fullness on the 0–15 scale: 0 when empty, 1 for any items at all, up to 15 when full. The exact level is min(15, 1 + floor(14 × count / 1728)).

  • Chest — a container of 27 slots × 64 items = 1728 items max. A plain chest never emits power or pulses an observer from its fill state; the comparator behind it is the only thing that reads it.
  • Barrel — a full-block container identical to a chest in behavior: up to 1728 items, read proportionally by a comparator with the same formula. It is block-shaped for visibility and orientation, but conducts no power on its own.
A comparator reads a chest's item count as a 0–15 analog signal, scaled by fullness — the core mechanic for storage and automation circuits.View & run →

Movable blocks

Some blocks stick to their neighbors and travel together when a piston pushes or pulls them. The connected group — the line in front of the piston plus everything stuck to it — moves as one, and a single push cancels entirely if that group exceeds the 12-block limit.

  • Slime Block — sticks to every adjacent movable block. When a piston (or a sticky piston pulling) moves it, the whole stuck group rides along — and that drag is recursive in all six directions, which is what makes multi-block platforms and flying machines work.
  • Honey Block — behaves exactly like slime — same piston mechanics, same drag recursion — except it does not stick to slime blocks, reversing the rule for that one pair.

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