A piston is a very useful block you can craft and use in redstone circuits and components in Minecraft.
Pistons can be used to push all kinds of blocks around in your world and, combined with redstone, you can use them to make some very impressive builds.
In this tutorial we will show you how to craft a piston and sticky piston and how to use both of them.
Minecraft Piston Recipe
- 3 wooden planks (any wood)
- 4 cobblestone blocks
- 1 iron ingot
- 1 redstone dust
Since pistons are redstone components, they will need redstone dust to be crafted, but also a lot of other different materials you will have to combine.
The wood can be matching or not.
Redstone dust can be found deeper underground at their ore level. Luckily they are easy to accumulate and you will need to do so. In most redstone builds you may need multiple different pistons.
This recipe is enough for only one piston.
Minecraft Sticky Piston Recipe
- 1 piston
- 1 slime ball
To make a sticky piston all you will need is to have a regular piston first. Combining it with a slime ball, which you can farm from slime cubes, you create a sticky piston.
This piston has slightly different usage than a regular one, which we will explain soon.
How to Use Pistons
Because pistons are redstone components, to use them properly you will need to activate them with a redstone pulse.
When activated, pistons will extend in the direction they were originally placed in.
If there are any blocks in the way of a regular piston, then that block will be pushed from the space they were in to another. When the regular piston closes again, the block will stay in place.
If there are more than one block in the way of the piston, then
Most blocks will move from their spot without being destroyed. Plants and items, on the other hand, will get destroyed and drop themselves as an item, usually.
There are quite a few blocks a piston can’t move and these are some of them:
- Bedrock
- Obsidian
- Crying obsidian
- Enchantment table
- Ender chest
- Grindstone
- Reinforced deepslate
- Respawn anchor
Sticky pistons work differently.
Instead of just pushing a block from its spot and leaving it there, a sticky piston makes a block stick to it. This means that as the piston opens and closes it’ll push and pull the block with it.
Sticky pistons are often used when building automatic builds with the use of redstone.
You can even build something akin to a flying machine with them.
What to do Next
If you’re looking for ideas on how to use pistons and what to build with them, then we have the perfect redstone build for you to try out.
Building an automatic TNT launcher with pistons can be a lot of fun and a good way to attack structures or your friends with explosives from afar. These builds use a minimal amount of other redstone components and they are both simple and fun to use.
