Pressure Plate

Pressure Plates were introduced in the third Seecret Friday update. If connected by wire to an object (or placed adjacent to a block that requires electricity), they will provide power to that object or block when stepped on by either a player or a mob, and will stop when stepped off.

There are currently only two types of pressure pads, wood and stone. Wooden pressure plates are made by lining up 3 wooden blocks in a horizontal matter, and stone pressure plates are made with smelted stone in the same fashion; see Crafting.

Pressure plates are one of the three types of Switches currently in the game.

You cannot place blocks/objects such as sand onto the pressure pads. However, throwing an item onto a wooden plate does trigger the plate. Stone plates, however, are not affected by this action. Finally, Notch has built in a mode to allow pressure plates to be activated only by humans, and not mobs. However, no block in the game currently uses this feature (except some mods).

Wooden pressure plates can be activated by shot arrows only if they have a flaming block directly adjacent or directly under them. The amount of flaming blocks increases the speed with which the pressure plate updates its state.

A plate enabled with this method remains turned on until the arrow is recollected or despawns (which takes exactly one minute as of v1.2.4_01).

Pressure plates can be triggered by minecarts. Wooden plates will trigger whenever any kind of cart passes over them, whereas stone plates are only triggered if the cart has a rider inside (either a player or a mob). Pressure plates do not act as Minecart Tracks, so the cart will stop on the plate unless it has very high speed.

Stone and wooden plates can be recovered with a pickaxe. Both can also be recovered by destroying the block they are on.

Crafting and Use
Used to activate objects while walking on them or having a Mob walk on them. Wooden Pressure Plates can also be activated by dropping something on them.

Druckplatte