How to Make a Hopper Clock in Minecraft

Redstone clocks are useful machines that allow you to trigger redstone component blocks in a loop. This means you can make Minecraft farms or other machines that’ll work independently. There are pretty simple redstone clock designs, and there are also the ones that are a bit more complex, but a lot better and more efficient. And in this guide, we will cover how you can make the hopper clock in Minecraft, one of the best redstone clocks in the game.

Table of Contents

Required You Need to Make a Hopper Clock

This design was first introduced by one of the best Minecraft YouTubers — EthosLab. His original tutorial video for the machine was released over ten years ago, and it’s still perfectly functional. It’s not difficult or expensive to build and can even be easily modified to suit your needs.

There are a few different alternative designs for the Etho hopper clock, mostly differing in one or two extra requirements. To build it, you’ll need the following resources:

• 2 Hoppers
• 2 Sticky Pistons
• 1 Block of Redstone
• 2 Redstone Repeaters
• 2 Redstone Comparators
• 4 Redstone Dust
• 2 Solid Blocks (we are using oak planks)
• 2 Slabs of any kind (we are using oak slabs)
• However many items you need inside the Hoppers (we are using sticks)

For crafting one hopper, you’ll need 5 iron ingots, one chest, and a crafting table. Place the chest in the central slot of the crafting grid and put iron ingots on either side of it and one below. Then, add two more iron ingots above the ones in the left and right column.

Redstone dust is a precious material obtainable when mining regular or deepslate redstone ore. We suggest you go through our guide on ore distribution in Minecraft to easily locate the redstone ores. Redstone block is a resource block you can craft using 9 pieces of redstone dust, filling the crafting table’s grid completely.

To make redstone repeaters, redstone comparators, and sticky pistons, you can follow our dedicated guides and find out all the details regarding those recipes.

Steps to Make a Minecraft Hopper Clock

Now that you’ve gathered the resources, let’s start constructing the Etho hopper clock.

• First, place two hoppers side by side facing into each other. You will need to place one facing downwards and then place the second one facing into the first one. Then, break the first hopper and place it so it’s connected to the second one.

• Next, place the comparator attached to one of the hoppers but facing away from the hopper. Therefore, it will read the hopper’s content and will send out a redstone signal if there are items inside that hopper.
• Also, place a redstone repeater attached to the comparator facing away from the comparator, so that it can receive and forward the redstone signal coming from that block. You don’t need to change the tick speed on the repeater.

• What you’ll want to do next is place one of your solid blocks attached to the repeater, so that the repeater is facing into it.
• Then, place a temporary block above that solid block and attach a slab to the side of that block. The slab should be the top half and also above the repeater. Remove the temporary block after you have the slab in place.

• After that, attach a sticky piston to the slab, so that it’s above the comparator and is facing towards the hopper.
• Add redstone dust on top of the slab and the solid block.

• Now, repeat all the steps from step 2 to step 7 on the other side attached to the second hopper. The finished product should look something like this:

• Then, place a block of redstone on one of the two hoppers.
• After that, put as many items as you need in any of the two hoppers. They should be stackable to 64 items, like sticks, and are there to determine the speed of the hopper clock. If you place 6 sticks in the hopper, then the whole clock will work much faster than if you were to put a stack of sticks inside.

• The clock should start working after you put the items in the hopper. Feel free to experiment with the quantity of items, and the clock’s speed so it fits your needs.

Congrats, you have created a working hopper clock in Minecraft! To make it functional, you can just connect it to the redstone circuit you already have, like the one for flushing mobs in a mob farm.

Simply place redstone dust attached to the redstone block. The redstone block will constantly move, so it will be both turning on and off the redstone dust. Then, you can connect that dust to whatever you need or place an observer “watching” the dust.

So, every time the dust turns on or off, the observer will detect it and send the redstone signal.

In order to turn off the hopper clock, you can power one of the two sticky pistons permanently using a lever. Place a solid block attached to the piston and a lever attached to it. Turning it on will disable the hopper clock.

There you have it, now you know how to make a hopper clock in this lovely blocky game. It’s a very useful redstone machine to know how to build, as you can use it in many different occasions, like in crop or mob farms or even in a massive prank on your friends. What do you think about this clock? Was our guide helpful to you? Tell us in the comment section below!