How to Make a Hopper in Minecraft and How Hoppers Work
Five iron ingots around a chest make a hopper. How to make a hopper in Minecraft, aim it, how fast it moves items, and redstone locking for sorters.
A hopper needs 5 iron ingots and 1 chest. Put the chest in the middle of a crafting table, then an iron ingot in the top-left, top-right, middle-left, middle-right and bottom-center slots, a V around the chest. You get one hopper. Any wooden chest works, so the full cost is 5 iron and 8 planks.
The two jobs a hopper does
It catches items. Anything dropped on top of a hopper, including mob drops, harvested crops and items from a dropper, gets sucked into its 5 slots. That’s why nearly every farm ends in a line of hoppers.
It moves items. A hopper passes items through its spout into whatever container it points at: a chest, barrel, furnace, brewing stand, dispenser, another hopper. It also pulls items out of a container sitting directly above it.
It does both at 2.5 items per second. That rate is the hopper’s main limit, so a high-output farm usually splits drops across several hoppers.
Aiming it
The spout points at the face you clicked when you placed it. To feed a chest from the side, sneak (so you don’t open the chest) and click the chest’s side. To send items straight down, click the top of the block below. A hopper can’t point up; for vertical transport upward, use droppers.
Common setups
- Farm collection: a row of hoppers under the kill zone or crop area, chained into a chest. Our automatic farm guide shows the usual layouts.
- Auto-smelter: a hopper into the top of a furnace carries items to smelt, one into the side carries fuel, and one under it collects the output. Hoppers fill the slot that matches the side they come from.
- Hopper minecart: in Java, a minecart with a hopper inside can pick up items lying on the block above its rail, which helps when the collection point is under a floor.
Redstone locking and sorting
When a hopper gets a redstone signal it locks: it stops moving items in or out. This one behavior makes item sorters possible. In a typical sorter, a redstone comparator reads a hopper loaded with filter items and unlocks it only when the right item arrives. The design takes a few dozen hoppers, so plan your iron. If iron is the bottleneck, an iron farm pays for itself here; our iron guide covers mining it in the meantime.
Things that catch people out
- A solid block on top of a hopper stops dropped items from falling in. A container on top is different: the hopper keeps emptying it.
- Hoppers can’t take items out of a container placed beside them, only one directly above.
- A double chest above a hopper counts as one container, so a single hopper can empty the whole thing.
Common questions
Which way does a hopper point?
Its narrow spout points at the block you clicked when placing it. Click the side of a chest to aim into the chest, or click the ground to point it straight down.
How fast does a hopper move items?
2.5 items per second, one item every 8 game ticks. That's slow enough that big farms often use several hoppers side by side.
How do you stop a hopper?
Power it with redstone. A powered hopper is locked and stops both pulling and pushing items until the signal turns off.
Sources & verification
Facts on this page are checked against these references and in-game behavior for the stated edition(s). how we verify.
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