Redstone Wire

Redstone Wire is a material used to transfer charge between objects. Charged objects can be used to open doors or activate certain items. It is the placed form of Redstone Dust, which can be found by mining Redstone Ore with an iron pickaxe or better. Unpowered wire will appear dark red (now black since the 1.3 Beta update); powered wire will appear in shades bright red with animated sparkling.

How wires connect and provide power
Redstone Wire is placed by right clicking on the surface of a block while Redstone (Dust) is selected in the action bar. Redstone Wire will connect to adjacent blocks that can provide power. These blocks are the Redstone Torch, Switches, and other wires. It does not try to form connections with things that "receive" power, like Doors. These connections need a straight run to or onto the receiving block.

You can tell if a wire is connected because its appearance will change: When placed alone or connected in all four directions, a wire looks like a cross (+). If it has one connection or two on opposite sides, it will look like a straight line (- or |) in that direction. Bends and T-junctions are also possible, when connected on the appropriate sides.

Redstone Wire will connect by running straight up and down the sides of blocks when changing levels, but there are some restrictions: The wire will only cross a 1-block difference in height. Also, the connection will be broken, if an opaque block is over the lower wire. (Visually, the block is cutting off the connection with its lower edge.)



Powered Redstone Wire will glow dimmer the farther it is from its source of power. Power will only travel through 15 blocks of wire, beyond which it stops sparkling entirely. It is possible, however, to extend this range with gates or Repeaters. The creation and use of gates are explained in Redstone circuits.



Historical notes
Redstone dust and the ability to create wires was introduced in Alpha, therefore, map areas generated before the Redstone update will not contain Redstone.

Redstone Wire used to be "destroyed" when stepped on in-game, but this was changed in an update, making "tripwires" no longer feasible.

Before Beta 1.3, powered Redstone Wire was the same red colour for its entire 15-block length, until the charge ended.

Trivia

 * When destroying redstone wire, the particles are grey. This is down to the redstone wire textures in terrain.png being white, so the game can colour them in-game according to how far from a source they are. Before the update that made wire colours dynamic, destroying wire would yield the appropriately coloured particles.
 * Power through redstone wire is transmitted instantly, despite length of wire.

Related pages

 * Redstone
 * Redstone (Ore)
 * Redstone (Dust)
 * Redstone (Torch)
 * Redstone circuits
 * Switches
 * Mechanisms
 * Traps

Redstone (Kabel) Czerwony kamień (przewód)