MC: Redstone

I like playing Minecraft. There's many reasons behind why, but one of my favorite ones is redstone. It's a great thing that allows creativity and logic to combine into the most wonderful creations and is one of the reasons that Minecraft is, in my opinion, one of the best games around. Experienced players often use and experiment with redstone in many of their creations, while new players don't know what it is or how to use it until they've done a quick google on how to use it, or stumbled across its usage in some other way.

''What is redstone?'' you may ask, depending on how much knowledge you have at your disposition about Minecraft and its gameplay. Redstone is, simply put, usually used for a rough simulation of electrical currents. Signals flow through it, enabling or disabling anything it's hooked up to. It's a form of binary electricity that is either on or off, and can be used for a ton of things, all depending on how creative whomever using it is, and how good they are at logical thinking to get redstone to do what they want it to.

Redstone itself makes three types of signal-related items in the game, even though redstone may be used to affect or be affected by basically any other items in the game. Redstone can be used for redstone dust, redstone torches and redstone repeaters. Redstone dust, when used on the ground, forms a wire that the kind-of-electrical signals can run through, redstone torches are a form of stick that constantly sends a signal that travels through redstone via itself and redstone repeaters are a way of extending the 8-block length that a normal signal can travel.

While these are the basic parts that are required for redstone-wiring, there are a ton of items in the game that can be associated with it. There's pressure-plates, levers, buttons, pistons, powered rails, doors, trapdoors and more that either affect or can be affected by redstone signals. Heck, even most blocks can ''electrified'' by redstone, and sent signals through (though only a very short length).

There's many uses of redstone, and usually the more creative the usage of it, the better it is. The Minecraft community likes new and interesting uses of redstone, and often copy and improve each others designs. It might seem like a waste of time to, say, use redstone to open a door instead of just hitting it once in the game, but the main usage of redstone isn't to do simple things like that. Sure, some people like to use redstone-wiring for almost everything, and often focus more on it than other parts of the game, but the brilliance of redstone allows a lot more to be done.

Based solely on the principles of redstone (it's either on or off), people have through the use of other things in the game made secret doors, calculators, displays, pop-up mazes and even digital clocks and 32-bit memory cells, similar to those used in computers. Redstone truly is an amazing part of the game, and is one of the reasons Minecraft has had such a huge success as it has, as it allows a lot more room for creativity than many other games do.

*Cough* Ninja Blade *Cough*

Some people even play Minecraft for the sole reason of experimenting with redstone, often ignoring any other parts of the game that are unrelated to their experimenting. Many people also install mods that allow them to get a completely flat map, without mountains or hills, to make it easier to experiment and make complicated and intricate designs for whatever they feel like making. Luckily I don't know of anyone's who plays with redstone to the point of obsession, but it's not entirely unlikely that many hours, if not days or weeks, have disappeared due to ''redstoning'' .

Basically, I'd sum redstone up with calling it a way to creatively play with electrical signals and make complicated designs, while being neither too complicated to not understand nor too simple to have a wide variations of usage. If anyone ever wants to play Minecraft, or already play it without knowing what redstone is, I recommend that you start playing with redstone, and find out what you can do with it. Redstone is one of the coolest things about minecraft, and should not be ignored, atleast not by anyone who wants to test Minecraft for its full worth, be it an expert, newbie, obsessed person or anyone else. Redstone is in simple terms: Absolutely great.