How to Make a Redstone Repeater in Minecraft, Set Delays

A redstone repeater is 2 redstone torches, 1 redstone dust and 3 stone. On a crafting table, put the torches in the left and right slots of the middle row with the dust between them, and lay the 3 stone across the bottom row. The top row stays empty. You get one repeater.

The stone has to be stone

This is the most common reason the recipe won’t show up. Cobblestone doesn’t work, and neither does smooth stone. You need plain stone: smelt cobblestone once in a furnace. (Smelt that stone again and you get smooth stone, which is the wrong block.) Mining stone with a Silk Touch pickaxe also gives you stone directly.

Redstone torches are a redstone dust on top of a stick. All told, a repeater costs 3 redstone dust; our redstone mining guide shows where to find it.

What a repeater does

A repeater has an input at the back and an output at the front, shown by the arrow. It does four jobs:

1. Boosts the signal. Redstone dust loses one level of strength per block and dies after 15. Any signal going into a repeater comes out at full strength, 15.
2. Adds delay. Use the repeater to move its slider. Each step is one redstone tick (0.1 seconds), from 1 to 4 ticks. Chain several for longer delays.
3. Works one way. Signals only pass from back to front, which stops circuits next to each other from interfering.
4. Locks. Power a repeater from the side with another repeater or comparator and it freezes in its current state, on or off, until the side signal stops.

Where you’ll use it

• Long wires. Put one every 15 blocks or less on any long line of dust.
• Timing. Piston doors need the pistons to fire in the right order; repeater delays handle that. See piston doors.
• Music. A row of note blocks separated by repeaters plays a tune, with the delays setting the rhythm.
• Clocks. Two repeaters feeding into each other in a loop make a simple pulse clock.
• Powering a block strongly. A repeater powers the block in front of it strongly, so dust on the far side of that block also gets the signal.

Repeater or comparator?

They look similar, and new players mix them up. The repeater boosts and delays. The comparator keeps the signal strength as it is, compares two signals and reads containers. If you just need the signal to go further, you want a repeater. For more on how they fit together, see redstone basics.