Daylight Detector

Overview

A daylight detector outputs a redstone signal proportional to the sky light reaching it, peaking at 15 at noon and falling to zero at night. Right-click it and it flips into inverted mode, where it does the opposite — off during the day, on at night — and that inverted mode is the one most players actually want, because it is what turns street lights on at dusk and closes a base door at nightfall automatically. It needs a clear view of the sky to work: any solid block above it, including a slab, kills the reading, though glass and other transparent blocks pass light through. Because the output is a strength rather than a switch, a comparator subtracting a fixed value gives you a threshold, which is how you build a light that comes on at a specific time rather than gradually. Weather affects it as well: rain and thunderstorms lower the reading during daylight, so a detector can double as a storm sensor if you tune the threshold. It is also useful as a simple in-world clock for farms that should only run during the day.

Turning lights on at dusk, closing doors and shutters at night, timing farms to daylight hours, and detecting rain and thunderstorms by the drop in its output.

Daylight Detector counts as a redstone block in Minecraft 1.21.4. A crafting table turns its ingredients into Daylight Detector. It breaks almost instantly, with a hardness of just 0.2.

You can break it by hand without losing the drop. It drops as the same block you mined. With a blast resistance of only 0.2 it will not survive an explosion.

Sixty-four fit in one inventory slot. The recipe calls for Glass, Nether Quartz, and Oak Slab. It is not used in any crafting recipe.

How to get it

Craft it from 3 glass, 3 nether quartz and 3 wooden slabs. The quartz makes it a post-Nether component, but only 3 pieces are needed and quartz is one of the most common Nether ores.

Tips

Right-click to invert it — inverted mode is what you want for automatic lighting at nightfall.
It needs open sky; even a slab directly above blocks it, though glass passes light through fine.
Feed it into a comparator in subtract mode to set a precise light threshold rather than a gradual fade.
Rain drops the daytime reading noticeably, so a tuned detector doubles as a weather sensor.

How long it takes to break

Hardness 0.2 puts Daylight Detector at 0.3 seconds a block bare-handed, or 0.05 seconds with the right tool at netherite tier.

Nothing here needs a minimum tier: whatever you swing, the block still drops, and the only difference is how long it takes.

The Efficiency formula is level² + 1 added to tool speed, which on a block this soft tips over into instant mining very early.

Tool	No enchantment	Efficiency III	Efficiency V
Hand	0.3 s	0.3 s	0.3 s
Wooden	0.15 s	instant	instant
Stone	0.1 s	instant	instant
Iron	instant	instant	instant
Diamond	instant	instant	instant
Netherite	instant	instant	instant
Golden	instant	instant	instant

Properties

Daylight Detector resists blasts at 0.2, which is not enough to survive anything explosive nearby. Light does not pass through it, and it emits none of its own. One inventory slot holds 64, the normal full stack. An axe is fastest here; any other class mines it at bare-hand speed, because the bonus only applies to the class the block is tagged for. As furnace fuel it burns for 15 seconds — one and a half smelting operations.

Transparent: No
Required tool: Any
Fuel value: 15 s