Dropper

Overview

A dropper looks like a dispenser and does something deliberately simpler: it ejects the item in front of it without using it. Point a dropper at open air and the item pops out onto the ground; point it at a container and the item goes directly into that container's inventory instead, with no drop and no despawn risk. That second behaviour is the reason droppers exist. A chain of droppers, each pointing at the next, is an item elevator that moves things upward, which hoppers cannot do because hoppers only ever move items down and sideways. Dropper chains are also the standard way to move items horizontally over long distances without the constant performance cost of a hopper line, since a dropper only does work when it receives a pulse. Like a dispenser, it draws from a random occupied slot and fires once per redstone rising edge. Because it never uses an item, a dropper is the right choice whenever you want to move something without triggering it — moving TNT, moving buckets, moving arrows into a chest rather than into a mob.

Moving items upward in a dropper elevator, transferring items into a container without a hopper's constant performance cost, and ejecting items into the world on a timer.

In Minecraft 1.21.4, Dropper is a redstone block. A crafting table turns its ingredients into Dropper. A hardness of 3.5 makes it slow going without the right tool.

Anything below a wooden pickaxe breaks it without leaving a drop. It drops as the same block you mined. It stacks to 64.

You make it with Cobblestone and Redstone Dust. The one thing it makes is Crafter.

How to get it

Craft it from 7 cobblestone and 1 redstone dust, which makes it one of the cheapest redstone components in the game — no iron, no bow and no quartz required.

Tips

• A dropper pointed into a container inserts the item directly rather than dropping it on the floor.
• Chain droppers upward with a clock to build an item elevator; hoppers cannot move items up at all.
• It fires once per redstone pulse, so drive it with an observer or a repeater clock rather than a lever.
• Unlike a dispenser it never uses the item, which is what you want when moving TNT or buckets around.

How long it takes to break

Dropper sits at hardness 3.5: 18 seconds per block with your fists, 0.6 with the correct netherite tool.

An iron tool takes 0.9 seconds and a diamond one 0.7, so the jump that actually matters for this block is the one to iron.

A weaker tool still breaks it, but anything under wooden returns nothing — you spend the time and lose the drop, which is how most veins get wasted.

Efficiency adds its level squared plus one to the tool speed, so Efficiency V is about 4 times faster than the same tool unenchanted.

Properties

Dropper has a blast resistance of 3.5, so a nearby explosion will usually destroy it. It blocks light completely and emits no light of its own. Stack size is 64 — the standard full stack. A pickaxe 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.

Crafting recipe

Crafting Table

→

Dropper

Drops

Mined with Wooden Pickaxe, Dropper drops itself.

Dropper

Used to craft

Dropper is an ingredient in 1 recipes, producing Crafter.

Crafter

Guides and tools that cover this

• GuidesFive Useful Redstone Builds for a Survival World→
• GuidesRedstone Basics: Signal Strength, Repeaters and Comparators→
• GuidesHow the Minecraft Crafting System Works→
• GuidesThe First Ten Things to Build in a New Minecraft World→

Frequently asked questions

Related pages

CobblestoneCrafterRedstone DustDispenserHeavy Weighted Pressure PlateDetector RailHopperDaylight Detector