Sticky Piston

The Sticky Piston is a block added in Beta 1.7 It is crafted by putting a Slime Ball on top of a Piston in a crafting table. This can be done in the 2x2 Crafting grid, because it only requires two spaces.

Sticky pistons, as their name suggests, "stick" to an object they push, and will pull the block in front of the paddle section back when they contract, an effect which is demonstrated here. The only way for a Block to be removed from a Sticky Piston is to either destroy the Sticky Piston or to destroy or push the Block or if you push the sticky Piston away, the block will not stick to the piston and thus not follow the movement of the piston. For more information on piston functions, see Piston.

The sticky piston adds a use to Slimeballs. The sticky piston will also be used for pushing spike blocks instead of having a spike piston.

Trivia

 * Sticky pistons can't move chests.

Controlling Water

 * Sticky pistons provide the much needed method for controlling water, without the previous method's needs for manually resetting the mechinism.

A simple water control example (from top looking down perspective) is:

NOTE: The Sticky Piston is not facing upwards, but left towards the cobble and air block: [AIR][COBBLE][<---Sticky Piston]

Toggling power on the sticky piston will open/close the air space below the water block, while hiding the sticky piston from player view. Water will flow out below. Anything can be used in place of the cobblestone, additionally the same model can be scaled length, width, or even up/down (to control water release on floors/levels).

Chaining Pistons
As of 1.7_01 Sticky pistons do not stick when they aren't retracting. This prevents them from being used as self-resetting fast elevators without difficulty.

Consider a column of 4 sticky pistons a, b, c and d from bottom to top all facing up. The player can stand on top of d and be pushed up 4 blocks by activating a, b, c, d in that order. However to retract the 4 pistons to their original places ontop of one another, the schedule is: -d, -c, -b, c, -c, -a, b, -b, c, -c; too difficult for most elevators. Further complicated by the fact that the locations of the pistons change dynamically during the schedule, whereas a redstone circuit to power them cannot.

In general: a column of length n > 2 requires a schedule of length n to extend and a schedule of length n2-2n+2 to retract.

Bugs

 * When attempting to pull beds or doors with a sticky piston, only half of the bed/door will be pulled by the piston, and the other half will disppear. If you activate or break the sticky piston, you'll also break the bed/door and be able to collect it.
 * When a piston or a sticky piston is placed upwards (with the redstone input being located 1 block bellow) and a rapid pulse signal is applied to the redstone, if the player tries to break the piston or sticky piston with any item, block, tool, or hand, the piston or sticky piston will break, dropping an item, but leaving a breakable piston head in mid-air.
 * When a piston attempts to push a redstone wire, the game crashes with a "Saving Chunks..." screen, corrupting the world as well.
 * When placing cake on a piston that isn't activated, then activate the piston, the cake disappears.