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, and 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. You can remove it by left clicking on the wire, thus breaking it like any other block: it will drop out reusable redstone dust. Redstone Wire will transfer power provided by Redstone Torches or different types of Switches from block to block. It can be connected to other wires and create circuits. However, it will not try to form automatic connections with blocks or items that "receive" power, like Doors. These blocks need a straight wire run to or onto them in order to receive power. Redstone Wire cannot be placed on glass or glass panes. Between Beta 1.8 to 1.1, redstone could not be put on glowstone but in 1.2, redstone's ability was added back into the game. However, levers and buttons and torches still do not work on glowstone, making many older maps unusable.

You can tell whether a wire is connected to other blocks due to its appearance: When placed alone and unconnected it looks like a dot on the surface of the block, but it will power all four surrounding blocks. If it is 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 |, depending on the location of the blocks connected). 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.

Please note that Redstone Wire cannot be placed vertically on surfaces. The only current way to extend vertically is to build a "stair step" pattern show above.



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

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 1.0.0, when destroying redstone wire, the particles are gray. This is due to the redstone wire textures in terrain.png being white, so the game can color them according to how far from a source they are. Before the 1.3 update (that made wire colors dynamic), destroying wire would yield the appropriately colored particles.

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

After the Beta 1.5 update, the two texture panels directly below the redstone wire textures (in terrain.png) are required to be empty. The 'empty' panels are layered on top of the normal ones in-game, potentially giving the redstone the 'grid' pattern if this requirement is not met.

In Minecraft 1.0 a single block of redstone wire not connected to anything looks like a small square, rather than a +, as in previous versions.

In the Minecraft Snapshot 12w25a, redstone wire gained the ability to be placed on top of upside down Stairs and Slabs.

Trivia

 * If you were to hack your inventory to give you redstone wire (not the dust, the actual wire), it will look gray in the inventory. This is because it is gray in the texture so it can be colored according to its power level. Also, it is called "Redstone Dust" while the real redstone dust is called "Redstone".
 * Redstone wire will graphically snap to any block if a redstone torch is placed on top of the block, however it will only truly power the block if the redstone would connect into the block even when the torch is removed.
 * If Redstone wire over an air block is powered, it breaks.

Bugs

 * Due to a bug, when lava hits redstone wire that is touching water, the redstone wire is transformed into obsidian.
 * Water flowing downward onto redstone wire will destroy the wire without dropping Redstone Dust.
 * The break texture doesn't work right on redstone. It displays TNT.
 * On the Xbox version, it frequently fails to function as it's supposed to.