How to Use a Hopper in Minecraft

The Minecraft adventure game contains a lot of items for you to explore and help you during your play. Hoppers are one such character that can help you to store things in a chest or a furnace. 

Hopper in Minecraft

There is a standard way to create them and use them effectively. This article will brief you on the steps you need to follow to work with Hoppers in Minecraft. Hoppers are available in all the Minecraft versions including the Pocket edition, Desktop edition and the console editions. 

How to craft a Hopper?

01. As for creating any other item, first you need to have the ingredients to create a Hopper. Make sure you have the following material in the crafting table to begin with:

  • 5 iron ores – These look like pieces of grey rock with orange or peach color spots on them. They can be found in cliff faces and caves. To mine an ore and get it, you should have a stone pickaxe or a similar tool.
  • 2 wood blocks – You can get any type of wood for this and chop them to get blocks. By chopping this way, each block will give you 4 wooden planks. With a total of 8 wooden planks like this, you will be able to build a chest.
  • An available fuel source – You will have 2 options of fuel. Either you can get coal by mining it from a black spotted grey rock or you can simply use wooden planks chopped from a tree.
  • A furnace – You can easily get a furnace by laying eight cobblestones around the crafting table border. 
  • A crafting table – To get a crafting table you need a 2×2 grid of wooden planks and get them on the crafting section of your inventory.

02. Now you should make wooden planks from the collected wood blocks. First place the blocks on the crafting table and drag and drop the formed planks to your inventory.

03. Then you should prepare the iron by smelting it. To do this, go to your furnace and open it by right clicking on it. Drag your fuel to the bottom of it and drop there. Then drag your iron to the top of it and drop there. After some time, you will get iron bars out from the furnace.

04. Next step is to create a chest. Go back to the crafting table and lay a wooden block on each of the empty boxes. Leave the center box empty. This will give you a chest which you can drag to the inventory and drop there.

05. Now you should get the iron bars formed at the furnace to your inventory too. Just like in other cases, you may drag those one by one and drop onto your inventory.

06. At this stage, you are considered to have all the necessary material to create a Hopper. So open your crafting table once again.

07. Get the five iron bars you created and place them on the top-left, top-right, middle-left, middle-right and middle bottom boxes respectively. Now place the chest on the center box. This will give you a Hopper. Finally, you may take your Hopper to the inventory by dragging and dropping it there.

How to Use a Hopper?

You have to place the Hopper above the ground. So use something, even a pile of dirt, to place underneath the Hopper to scaffold it. You can do this by facing the dirt block placed and pressing on the “Place” button. Then the Hopper will appear there with its wider section to the top and standing on the thinner section.

Now you can remove the dirt block beneath the Hopper which will leave space for you to place something else there. Say, you place a chest on this empty space now. The Hopper will funnel what you put into the chest directly to it, allowing any items to spill on the floor.

To add items to funnel through, you need to right click on the Hopper to open it. When it is opened, you shall pour what you have or add the items you want to be put to the chest. The Hopper will immediately allow the items to flow through it into the chest safely and in order.

You can also use this setup to trap monsters and cause them to die in the process. If you place this Hopper and the chest at the very bottom of a 30 block high shaft, the monsters who come looking for it will fall directly into this shaft and will die. At the same time, the loot that you gain by the death of those monsters will immediately be collected to the chest through the Hopper. However, you should be alert about the capacity of the chest also. If the chest is out of space for more treasure, then the loot will not be collected.

Another use of the hopper is to collect cooked food for you. This can be done by placing a furnace at the top of the Hopper while the chest remains at the bottom. Then you can add fuel to the furnace and place raw food such as meat, etc. on it. This will cook your food for you. Once cooked, the food will be sent directly to the chest through the Hopper automatically, just like in other cases. But you should also place the Hopper so that its spout faces the chest. Otherwise the food will spill on the floor and you will not be able to eat it. 

Final Words

Minecraft has so many features, items and characters you can explore by yourself. However, if you know how to use each of them exactly, it will help you complete the quests easily. This article is meant to educate you about creating and using the character Hopper and about how effective they are in the Survival and Creative modes of the game. 

So make sure you follow these instructions for a better and more adventurous game in Minecraft.

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