Hopper

Type	Block Entity
Physics	No
Transparency	Partial (does not block light, mob spawning possible)
Luminance	No
Blast resistance	24
Hardness	3
Tool
Renewable	Yes
Stackable	Yes (64)
Flammable	No
First appearances	See History
Drops	Hopper (1) plus contents
Block entity id	hopper
Data values	See Data values
Name	hopper

This article is about the block. For the crash utility, see Hopper (crash utility).

A hopper is a block that can be used to catch item entities, or to transfer items into and out of containers.

Obtaining[edit | edit source]

A hopper can be obtained by crafting, by breaking a previously-placed hopper with a pickaxe, or by breaking a minecart with hopper.

Breaking[edit | edit source]

To break a hopper, mine it with a pickaxe. If mined with anything but a pickaxe it will not drop itself.

Block	Hopper
Hardness	3
Tool
Breaking time^{[note 1]}
Hand	15
Wooden	2.25
Stone	1.15
Iron	0.75
Diamond	0.6
Golden	0.4

↑ Times are for unenchanted tools in seconds.

Crafting[edit | edit source]

A hopper can be crafted from 5 iron ingots and a chest.

Ingredients	Crafting recipe
Iron Ingot + Chest

Usage[edit | edit source]

Hoppers can face down or sideways.

See also: Tutorials/Hopper

A hopper can be used as a container, as a crafting ingredient, and as a redstone component.

A hopper has an "output" tube at its bottom that can face down or sideways and provides visual feedback of which direction the hopper will output items to if a container is present. To place a hopper, use the Place Block control while aiming at the surface to which its output should face (a hopper will not automatically orient itself to point at a container). To place a hopper so that it faces a container (or other block which has a Use Item interaction), sneak while placing the hopper. A hopper placed while aiming at the bottom of a block will re-orient to face down instead. Hoppers won't change their direction after being placed and aren't "attached" to the container they are facing—the container can be removed and the hopper will continue to face in the same direction.

Hoppers cannot be moved by pistons.^{[Java and Console editions only]} Despite not appearing as a solid block, attached blocks such as rails, levers, tripwire and redstone dust can be placed on top of hoppers (but not on their side).

Container[edit | edit source]

Hopper GUI showing the hopper's five slots of inventory at the top and the player's inventory below.

A hopper can be used as a container and has 5 slots of inventory space.

To open the hopper GUI, use the Use Item/Place Block control. To move items between the hopper inventory and the player inventory or hotbar while the hopper GUI is open, drag or shift-click the items. To exit the hopper GUI, use the Esc control.

By default, the GUI of a hopper is labeled "Item Hopper". A hopper's GUI label can be changed by naming the hopper in an anvil before placing it, or by using the blockdata command (for example, to label a hopper at (0,64,0) "Alice's Hopper", use blockdata 0 64 0 {CustomName:"Alice's Hopper"}).

A hopper can be "locked" (or subsequently unlocked) by setting the hopper's Lock tag with the blockdata command. If a hopper's Lock tag is not blank, the hopper cannot be accessed except by players holding an item with the same name as the Lock tag's text. For example, to lock a hopper at (0,64,0) so that only players holding an item named "Alice's Key" can access the hopper, use blockdata 0 64 0 {Lock:"Alice's Key"}.

Crafting ingredient[edit | edit source]

A hopper can be used to craft a minecart with hopper.

Name	Ingredients	Crafting recipe
Minecart with Hopper	Hopper + Minecart

Redstone component[edit | edit source]

See also: Redstone circuit

A hopper can be used to suck in item entites above it, or to transfer items to or from other containers.

Hoppers are redstone mechanisms and can be activated by:

An adjacent active power component: for example, a redstone torch (except that a redstone torch will not activate a hopper it is attached to), a block of redstone, a daylight sensor, etc.
An adjacent powered block (for example, an opaque block with an active redstone torch under it)
A powered redstone comparator or redstone repeater facing the hopper
Adjacent powered redstone dust configured to point at the hopper (or on top of it) or directionless; a hopper is not activated by adjacent powered redstone dust that is configured to point away from it.

A hopper's behavior is the opposite of most redstone components, in that it performs actions while not activated and stops performing actions when activated. Thus, an unactivated hopper is described as enabled and an activated hopper is described as disabled.

An enabled hopper can do three things:

suck item entities (free-floating items in the world) into its inventory from the space above it
pull a single item into its inventory from a container above it
push a single item from its own inventory into a container it is facing

Hoppers with containers above them to pull from (furnaces, chests, other hoppers, etc.) do not suck in item entities above them (and don't even check for them, reducing the number of updates required by hoppers). Item entities can be sucked in if they are anywhere within the block's space above the hopper, so can be sucked in even if sitting on a partial block above the hopper (for example, on a slab) or even if inside a full block above the hopper (because they are rising up through solid blocks or because they were summoned there). Item entities will not be sucked in if they are more than one block above the hopper (for example, an item on a block of stone above a hopper will not be sucked in). Hoppers check for item entities above them every game tick and can suck them in even before the item entities are destroyed by lava above the hopper, or before they are picked up by players.

Hoppers pull before they push — If items are placed in the top chest, the middle chest won't receive any items until the bottom hopper fills up, because the bottom hopper pulls items from the middle hopper before the middle hopper can push items into the chest.

Hoppers have a "transfer cooldown" time. After pulling or pushing items, a hopper will wait 4 redstone ticks (8 game ticks, or 0.4 seconds barring lag) before pulling or pushing again (a transfer rate of 2.5 items per second barring lag). Item pulls and pushes are processed in the same game tick, but pulls are processed before pushes (see schematic, right). Item entities can be sucked in at any time, without affecting the item transfer cooldown time, and can be sucked in as entire stacks (rather than a single item at a time).

A hopper always tries to pull or suck items into the leftmost available slot (either because the slot is empty or because it contains an incomplete stack of the item being pulled), and pushes items from its leftmost slots before it pushes from rightmost slots (it won't start pushing items from its second slot before its first is empty, from its third slot before the first two are empty, etc.) unless the container it is pushing into can only accept items from the hopper's rightmost slots (because the container is full except for incomplete stacks matching the hopper's rightmost items). A hopper won't suck or pull items, even when enabled, if it has no available slots to accept available items (there are no empty slots and no incomplete stacks of items that match available items). Similarly, a hopper pushes items into the top left available slots of containers before the bottom right slots, and will stop pushing items if there are no available slots to push items into.

Some containers interact with hoppers in specific ways:

Dispenser
Dropper
Shulker Box: Dispensers, droppers, and shulker boxes interact with hoppers normally.

Beacon: A hopper can push only diamonds, emeralds, gold ingots, and iron ingots into a beacon. Although the beacon interface usually only allows a single item to be placed in the beacon, a hopper can push an entire stack of items into the beacon's inventory slot. These items can also be removed by a hopper beneath the beacon.

Brewing Stand: A hopper above a brewing stand will only fill the top ingredient slot and will only push potion ingredients into that slot. A hopper to the side of a brewing stand will only push water bottles and potions into the bottom three slots (and if there is an ingredient in the top slot, only if the item could be brewed by that ingredient), or push blaze powder into the fuel slot. A hopper underneath a brewing stand will only pull from the bottom three slots, whether the brewing is finished or not – keep the hopper disabled to allow potions to finish brewing.

Chest
Trapped Chest: Large chests and large trapped chests are treated as a single unit: a hopper placed on a large chest will fill up the whole chest, and a hopper underneath a large chest will empty the whole chest. Trapped chests being accessed by a player will disable any adjacent hopper (which is normal behavior for a hopper next to an active power source).

Furnace: A hopper above a furnace will only fill the ingredient slot but will push any items, even items that can't be smelted in a furnace. A hopper to the side of a furnace will only fill the fuel slot and will only push items into that slot that can be used as fuel in the furnace. A hopper below a furnace will only pull from the furnace's output slot (except that it will also pull empty buckets from the furnace's fuel slot left over from using a lava bucket as fuel). A hopper removing items from a furnace will not produce experience points.

Hopper: A sequence of three or more hoppers, each pushing items into the next, is known as a hopper pipe. Horizontal hopper pipes simply transfer items at the expected rate of 2.5 items per second, but vertical hopper pipe behavior can be difficult to understand because the hoppers are both pulling and pushing items between them. If a vertical hopper pipe pulls items from a container, it will simply transfer items at 2.5 items per second (because the transfer rate is limited by the first hopper pulling items from the container), but if a stack of items is in a vertical pipe (because an item stack entity was sucked in, or placed there by a player) the items will be transferred twice as fast because the hopper with the item stack is pushing items down while the hopper below it is also pulling items down.; Because pulls and pushes occur in the same game tick, a redstone comparator measuring the fullness of a hopper in a hopper pipe will usually simply stay powered as a continuous stream of items flows through (instead of blinking on and off for each item), but certain hoppers in a vertical hopper pipe may never power their comparators even with a continuous stream of items because their items get pulled out of them one game tick after the items are pushed into them, which doesn't produce a state long enough for a comparator to measure (comparators need inputs at least 1.5 redstone ticks long to produce an output).

Minecart with Chest
Minecart with Hopper: Hoppers will fill minecarts with chests or hoppers if any part of the minecart is in the space the hopper is pointing at. Hoppers can also take items from minecarts above them (rails can be placed directly on top of hoppers). A hopper will not unload a minecart that is on a detector rail above the hopper, because the detector rail will disable the hopper (which is normal behavior for a hopper next to an active power source).

Ender Chest: Hoppers cannot remove items from or place items into ender chests. They do not interact with them in any way.

A disabled hopper does not pull items from above (including item entities) or push them out, but may receive items from other droppers and hoppers, and may have its items removed by another hopper beneath it. To stop item transfer in a horizontal hopper pipe, only one hopper needs to be disabled, but to stop item transfer in a vertical hopper pipe, it is necessary to disable two hoppers in a row (because if a single hopper is disabled, the hopper above it can still push items into it and the hopper below it can still pull items from it).

Data values[edit | edit source]

A hopper has an ID name of minecraft:hopper and is further defined by its block data and block entity. A hopper also has a block state that is expected to replace the functionality of block data in 1.13.^[upcoming]

ID[edit | edit source]

	ID name	PC numeric ID	PE numeric ID
Block	`hopper`	154	154
Item	`hopper`	154	410

Block data[edit | edit source]

See also: Data values

A hopper uses its block data to specify its orientation and activation status.

Bits	Values
0x1 0x2 0x4	A three-bit field storing a value from 0 to 5: 0: Output facing down 1: (unused) 2: Output facing north 3: Output facing south 4: Output facing west 5: Output facing east
0x8	Set if activated/disabled.

Block entity[edit | edit source]

See also: Block entity format

A hopper has a block entity associated with it that holds additional data about the block. The block's block entity ID is hopper.

Block entity data
- Tags common to all block entities see Template:Nbt inherit/blockentity/template
- CustomName: Optional. The name of this container, which will display in its GUI where the default name ordinarily is.
- Lock: Optional. When not blank, prevents the container from being opened unless the opener is holding an item whose name matches this string.
- Items: List of items in the container.
  - : An item, including the slot tag.
    - Tags common to all items see Template:Nbt inherit/item/template
- TransferCooldown: Time until the next transfer in game ticks, naturally between 1 and 8 or 0 if there is no transfer.
- LootTable: Optional. Loot table to be used to fill the hopper when it is next opened, or the items are otherwise interacted with.^{[note 1]}
- LootTableSeed: Optional. Seed for generating the loot table. 0 or omitted will use a random seed.^{[note 1]}

↑ ^a ^b Both loot table tags will be removed once the items have been generated.

Block state[edit | edit source]

See also: Block states

Name	Value	Description
enabled	`true` `false`	True if hopper can move items to and from its inventory. When the hopper is being powered by redstone current, this is set to false.
facing	`north` `south` `east` `west` `down`	The direction the hopper's output points. The hopper will push items into containers in this direction only.

Achievements[edit | edit source]

Main article: Achievements

Icon	Achievement	In-game description	Actual requirements (if different)	Availability				Xbox points earned	Trophy type (PS)
Icon	Achievement	In-game description	Actual requirements (if different)	Xbox	PS	Pocket	Nintendo	Xbox points earned	Trophy type (PS)
	Freight Station	Use a hopper to move an item from a chest minecart to a chest.		No	No	Yes	No	15G	—
	Smelt Everything!	Connect three chests to a single furnace using three hoppers.		No	No	Yes	No	15G	—

Video[edit | edit source]

History[edit | edit source]

Official release

1.5

13w01a

In snapshot 13w01a, the hopper item uses a 'WIP' sprite, though the item still read "Hopper".

Added hopper, but with a temporary "work in progress" sprite for the inventory.
They could be crafted from a chest and stone blocks with the following recipe: