You may have heard of Minecraft players building weird and wonderful contraptions, and redstone is what's needed to accomplish that. If you're just getting into Minecraft, or otherwise simply haven't sat down to figure the stuff out yet, redstone may still be a bit of a mystery to you.

Redstone ore is red and glows when you touch it. The dust looks like blood when you place it and you could probably use it creatively for a murder scene. But what actually is Minecraft redstone, and what is it actually intended to be used for?

Let's look at how redstone can be useful to you.

What Is Minecraft Redstone?

Redstone dust in its on and off states

If you've got your hands on some redstone already in your Minecraft world, it will most likely be as a dust that you can place on the ground, although you might have ended up with some redstone ore if you have a Silk Touch pickaxe.

Redstone dust is the most basic redstone component, and has a simple but interesting property that single-handedly adds a great deal of depth and complexity to the game - it can transmit a signal of "redstone power" in a manner similar to a wire or cable.

Redstone power is just a simple "on" or "off" transmission, with a signal strength that can travel up to a certain distance along a line of redstone dust. A variety of sources can generate and alter such signals; examples include redstone torches, buttons, levers, pressure plates, target blocks, and the somewhat more complicated observers and comparators.

Computer-savvy readers may recognize this as a form of binary logic and realize that there are a lot of possibilities here. With a bit of know-how, it's possible to build very useful (or very fun) contraptions in your world, which could be very simple or highly sophisticated.

Where Can You Find Redstone in Minecraft?

Redstone ore in its natural habitat

Usually, you'll come across some redstone ore while you're hunting for other things (such as diamonds), so unless you're actively ignoring or discarding the stuff, you'll probably end up with some in your inventory or storage chests, eventually.

But supposing you haven't found any, or want to get a bunch of it quickly, where should you look?

In the early game, the simplest method is to just go mining for redstone ore. You'll need to use an iron pick or better to get redstone dust from redstone ore, and using a Fortune enchantment will drastically improve your yields.

You can find the ore itself underground, around about the same level as diamonds, so if you've seen diamonds around, you're looking in the right place. To be specific, redstone ore generates at Y coordinate 16 or below (you can use the F3 overlay to check the Y coordinate of a block you're looking at).

As of version 1.18, you'll also find more the deeper you mine, so going deeper than Y=-34 might be most efficient. You could go exploring caves or simply dig a straight 2x1 strip mine; either way, you'll find some eventually as long as you're deep enough underground.

Trading for redstone

Cleric-type villagers will also trade you redstone dust for emeralds, so if you have an excellent source of emerald income, you don't have to worry about mining for redstone at all.

For this reason, it's a good idea to get yourself set up to earn some emeralds as soon as possible if you plan to use a lot of redstone.

Start harvesting something that villagers will buy (or just steal all their hay bales and sell the wheat to a farmer), and when you have enough redstone, you can start some automated farming to enjoy a steady supply of emeralds that you barely need to lift a finger for.

It's also possible to get redstone dust as a drop from witches. Having said that, this isn't a great way to obtain it unless you're ready to do some seriously advanced mob drop farming—you'll need to build a witch farm, which is an extensive project even for skilled technical players.

What Do You Use Redstone For?

So you've got yourself some redstone, now what? Personally, I like to use Redstone to make my life easier in survival mode, but you can use redstone to create anything from simple traps, doors, and logic gates, to automated farms, item sorting systems, puzzles and games, and even fully functional computing systems.

To give yourself an idea of what you can do with redstone, jump into a creative world and grab yourself some redstone dust, a lever, a sticky piston, and some blocks.

Make a line of redstone connecting the lever to an upward facing sticky piston, stick a block on top of the piston's face, and then pull the lever. Like magic, it moves! You may realize already how this might be useful for you. The ability simply to move a block at the flick of a switch can open up a lot of possibilities for traps, doors, aesthetics, and more.

Sticky piston in action

Note also that redstone power transmits through blocks in fairly interesting ways. The details are beyond the scope of this article, but we recommend you try experimenting a little with different placements for your lever and blocks.

This way, it's possible to conceal most of your redstone wiring. In the example below the redstone is below the block the lever is on, but still receives input from it. Nifty.

Pushing a block out of the floor

Here are examples of some more functional contraptions to give you a better understanding of what is possible.

Some automated farms

Here we're automatically farming sugar cane, feathers, and roast chicken. You can easily build these farms very early on in survival.

A 2x2 piston door

A 2x2 piston door is simple to build; it keeps mobs out, can't be broken by zombies, and gives a much more modern aesthetic compared to oak or iron.

A melon and pumpkin farm

A melon and pumpkin farm can single-handedly earn you enough emeralds to fund all the villager trading you will ever need. And as mentioned before, if you have enough emeralds, villagers can provide you with the redstone you need for future projects!

An eight furnace array

A "super smelter" (also known as a furnace array) spreads the items you want to smelt over multiple furnaces, drastically reducing the amount of time you spend standing around waiting for your stacks of iron to cook.

A filtered item storage system

An automatic filtered item storage system can keep all your items in order so you don't have to go digging through a mountain of chests and shulker boxes every time you need something.

A cunning trap

Or maybe you just want to blow up your enemies (and/or friends)? This simple pressure plate trap carries a payload of eight TNT mine carts, and spells instant doom for anyone unfortunate enough to set it off.

Now You Know What Redstone Is in Minecraft

The fastest way to learn is to look at what other people have created and trying to understand how it's all put together.

You'll quickly come to discover which redstone components are the most useful for what you want to achieve, and from there you can look for more in-depth explanations of how they function.

And of course, there are tons of step by step video tutorials for how to build all sorts of contraptions of varying degrees of complexity (some with better explanations than others). With a bit of effort, you'll be a certifiable redstone engineer in no time!