Redstone Lamp — Minecraft block

Overview

A redstone lamp is a light source with a switch. Unpowered it is a dark, slightly greenish block; give it any redstone signal and it lights at level 15, the same as a torch at full strength but from a full solid block that fits into a wall, floor or ceiling flush. That is what makes it the standard lighting for builds where visible torches would look wrong, and the only sensible choice for lighting that has to change — a corridor that lights as you walk through it, a room controlled from a lever at the door, a beacon of lamps that flashes on a clock. It updates instantly when powered and takes a couple of ticks to go dark again, which is short enough to be invisible in practice. Being a solid block it can be walked on and built into a floor, and mobs will not spawn on top of a lit one. Combined with a daylight detector in inverted mode it becomes street lighting that manages itself; combined with a target block it becomes a light you can switch on by shooting it from across the room.

Switchable full-block lighting for interiors, automatic street lights driven by a daylight detector, and flush floor or ceiling lighting where a torch would break the look of a build.

Minecraft classifies Redstone Lamp as a redstone block. A crafting table turns its ingredients into Redstone Lamp. It breaks almost instantly, with a hardness of just 0.3.

You can break it by hand without losing the drop. It drops as the same block you mined. With a blast resistance of only 0.3 it will not survive an explosion.

Sixty-four fit in one inventory slot. The recipe calls for Redstone Dust and Glowstone. It is not used in any crafting recipe.

How to get it

Craft it from 4 redstone dust and 1 glowstone block. Glowstone grows on Nether ceilings and shatters into 2 to 4 dust without Silk Touch, so 4 dust rebuild a block if you are short.

Tips

A lamp lights at level 15, which is enough to stop every mob spawn on and around the block.
It stays lit only while powered, so pair it with a lever for a permanent light or a detector for an automatic one.
Redstone dust running over a lamp does not power it — the dust must terminate at it or point into it.
Silk Touch on glowstone gives you the whole block back, which is far more efficient than collecting dust.

Properties

Redstone Lamp resists blasts at 0.3, which is not enough to survive anything explosive nearby. Light does not pass through it, and it emits none of its own. A single slot takes 64, the usual full stack.

Transparent: No
Required tool: Any