Tutorials/Shulker box storage

This tutorial is about loading and unloading shulker boxes for mass storage of items.

Uses

Loaders

If you have a farm that produces a lot of items, a shulker box loader can come in very handy. They have three basic parts: the system to fill the shulker box, the piston to break the shulker box once it's full, and the dispenser to place a new shulker box.

Unloaders

The player might not find unloaders as useful, but they still have very practical purposes. If the player's base has a storage system, then the player can come back from a long journey and dump an inventory-full of shulker boxes with various valuables into a chest. A system could then unload the shulker boxes and sort out the contents.

If the player has an automatic tree farm, then they can fill several shulker boxes with bonemeal and have them unloaded gradually to be used.

If the player constructed a printer, especially 3D, it is easiest to program using shulker boxes to “write” the instructions and a shulker box unloader to “read” the instructions.

Designs

Loaders

Below are a few designs that use the same three basic parts of a shulker box loader.

Unloaders

Shulker box unloaders have the same basic parts, but the piston and dispenser need to activate when the current shulker box is empty. Below are a few designs of this kind. They are much less common than loaders.

Combinations

Although hard to find, there are some designs that can load and unload with the same system, just pushing a few buttons to switch between the two "modes."