How to Make a Minecraft Item Sorter

Keep your things organized in your world with a Minecraft Item Sorter. Here’s your guide to building item sorters in Minecraft.

What are Item Sorters in Minecraft?

An item sorter is a type of redstone mechanism that can be used to automatically filter specific items into chests. It is very useful in managing your inventory especially if you have accumulated so much stuff already.

What Materials Do You Need in Building A Minecraft Sorter?

The basic materials that you need to build a Minecraft sorter include redstone torch, redstone dust, comparators, hoppers, repeaters, builder blocks, and chests.

How to Build a Minecraft Item Sorter

There are various ways you can build a Minecraft item sorter.

Here are the steps to building a simple item sorter in Minecraft. This Minecraft item sorter requires one redstone torch, three redstone dust, one comparator, one repeater, two hoppers, two chests, and six builder blocks plus four extra blocks. To add more item sorters, just multiply the above to the number of item sorter that you want to make.

Put a builder block two stacks high and add two builder blocks on both ends of the top block forming a t-shape.
Put a repeater beside the bottom block, under one of the blocks that is jutting out.
Add a redstone torch on the bottom side of the bottom block opposite the repeater.
Put another block beside the repeater.
Place a comparator on the top of the block above the redstone torch.
Put redstone dust on the rest of the top blocks and the block beside the repeater.
Put a hopper facing towards the comparator.
Place four locking blocks inside the hopper in the second to fourth slots.
Place the items that you are going to sort in the first slot of the hopper.
Place another hopper under the first hopper, this time facing the opposite direction.
Put a chest beside the second hopper.
Repeat the process to build more item sorters.

Watch the more detailed video tutorial below.

Additional Tips for Building a Minecraft Item Sorter

Chests are usually placed sideways to the right of the bottom hopper. Also, additional hoppers can be added below or to the right of the bottom hopper to attach more chests. The bottom hopper is the only one that needs to be powered (though one immediately below it would also be powered by the redstone torch), so as many hoppers and chests as necessary can be added.
At the end of an item sorter, you can place a chest to catch any items that didn’t get sorted for some reason like when the chest that is intended for items gets full. This can also be helpful in case a valuable tool is accidentally dropped in so you have a way to recover it.
There are various ways that can be used to carry items across the input hopper to potentially be picked up. The most common ones include hopper pipes, item streams, and chest- or hopper-minecarts. A hopper pipe is simply a chain of hoppers all pointing at each other in a continuous line. Item streams, are made by running water over the hoppers and dropping items into the flow with a dropper. Chest-minecarts and hopper-minecarts can be used to deliver items to filter hoppers by moving them across rails on top of the filter hoppers but this method is slower compared to others.

What is a redstone?

Redstone is a very useful and relatively rare material in Minecraft that can be found deep underground or in caves. You can only mine it with a pickaxe made of iron or a greater material. It has multiple applications including creating lights, opening doors, and building devices that lift stones, raise bridges, or move water.

What is a Redstone Dust?

A redstone dust is a mineral that can transmit redstone power when placed as a block. They can be obtained by breaking Redstone blocks using an iron pickaxe or higher. Each redstone block has a chance to drop 4-5 redstone dus.t

What is a Redstone torch?

A redstone torch is one of the basic items of redstone circuits. It is made from a piece of redstone and a stick. A redstone torch powers the block that contains it and the block above it.

What is a Hopper?

A hopper is a storage block that can be used to collect item entities directly above it, as well as to transfer items into and out of other containers.

What is a Redstone Repeater?

A redstone repeater is a block used in redstone circuits to “repeat” redstone signals back to full strength, delay signals, prevent signals from moving backwards, or to “lock” signals in one state.

What is a Comparator?

A comparator is a redstone component that is used to analyze, maintain, and measure the redstone signals of different blocks and components. It looks quite similar to a repeater but it has three torches instead of two. It can be used specifically for the following.

Comparing current strengths – It compares the main signal that it receives through the back (base of the arrow) with a signal that it gets through the side, and sends its output through the front.

Reporting the fullness of containers-If the base of a comparator is placed against a container it will output a current with a strength that depends on how full the container is. This can be used to test whether a container is empty or to compare how full two different containers are.