Tutorials/Shulker box storage

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

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.

In an automatic tree farm, several shulker boxes with bone meal can be unloaded gradually to be used.

In 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.

Search Engines
If you end up with chests full of random shulker boxes and you can't easily find the ones you need, you might want to start using a machine that uses a shulker box search engine.

With these machines, you can store your shulker boxes without worrying about sorting them or even the items within them.

The machine uses a filter to look for a specific item in the shulker boxes you have stored in your system until it finds a shulker box that contains the item you are looking for.

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

Jaminv's designs
Accessible loader - The shulker box being loaded can be accessed by the player.

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."

Search Engines
Another way redstone can aid shulker box storage is by making use of a so-called "Search Engine". This allows you to look for specific items in specific shulker boxes, even when the shulker boxes are stored in random order.

These machines can get very complicated very fast, which is why there are not a lot of working designs out there.

unobtanium's design
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