How to Make a Hopper and an Item Sorter in Minecraft

Here’s how to make a hopper in Minecraft: put 5 iron ingots and a chest on a crafting table. A hopper has 5 slots, picks up items that land on it and passes them on at 2.5 items per second. Checked against Java 26.3.

How to make a hopper in Minecraft: the recipe

First craft a chest from 8 planks of any wood. Then fill the crafting table like this:

• Top row: iron ingot, empty, iron ingot.
• Middle row: iron ingot, chest, iron ingot.
• Bottom row: empty, iron ingot, empty.

A sorter takes quite a few hoppers, so an iron farm comes in handy. When you place it, aim at the face its output should point to, such as the block below or the side of a chest. Sneak to place it onto a chest.

How hoppers move items

A hopper does three jobs, in this order.

• Push: it passes an item into the container its output points at.
• Pull: if a container sits on top, it takes an item out of that.
• Collect: otherwise it picks up items lying in the block above it. A full block on top stops this.

After each move it waits 8 game ticks, or 0.4 seconds. That makes 2.5 items per second, also through a long sideways line of hoppers. A hopper that gets a redstone signal stops all three jobs, but other hoppers can still fill it.

With a furnace, a hopper on top fills the ingredient slot, one on the side adds fuel and one underneath takes out the result.

Build a simple item sorter in Minecraft

An item sorter takes one kind of item out of a stream and stores it in its own chest. This is the wiki’s basic design: one slice per item, one block wide, silent and good for 2.5 items per second.

Per slice you need 2 hoppers, a chest, a comparator, a repeater, a redstone torch, 3 redstone dust and some solid blocks. Comparator and repeater both need 3 stone, smelted from cobblestone, and the comparator also takes a nether quartz. Seen from the side:

1. Bottom hopper: point it sideways into the chest.
2. Filter hopper: put it on top and point it sideways, away from the chest. If it points down, it pushes everything into the bottom hopper.
3. Comparator: place it in the block the filter hopper points at, facing away from the hopper. The block under the comparator touches the bottom hopper.
4. Redstone dust: from the comparator’s front, lay 2 dust away from the hoppers, then 1 more dust one block lower.
5. Repeater: on the hopper side of the block under that last dust, place a repeater on 1 tick. Point it towards the hoppers, into another solid block.
6. Torch: put a redstone torch on the hopper side of that block. It ends up right below the block under the comparator. The torch powers that block, and that keeps the bottom hopper locked.
7. Fill the filter hopper: 41 of your item in the first slot and one junk item in each other slot. Rename the junk items in an anvil, so they never show up in your stream.
8. Feed it: run your items over the filter hoppers, in a line of hoppers or a water stream. End with a chest for anything that didn’t get sorted.

Why 41? In the wiki’s comparator table, a hopper gives signal strength 3 from 46 items. With 41 items and 4 junk items the signal is too weak to reach the repeater. One extra item of the right kind turns the torch off, so the bottom hopper unlocks, pulls that item down and locks again. Other items can’t get into the full filter hopper, so they travel on.

When the chest is full, the filter hopper fills up too. A full stack plus 4 junk items gives strength 3, which unlocks its own bottom hopper but not the next slice. That’s the overflow protection. The wiki also has a compact version with 1 item and 21 junk items, without that protection. For Bedrock Edition the wiki has a separate design.

The crafter: automatic crafting

The crafter in Minecraft crafts on its own whenever it gets a redstone signal. It’s been in the normal game since Java 1.21.

• Recipe: 3 iron ingots on top, then iron ingot, crafting table, iron ingot, and redstone dust, dropper, redstone dust at the bottom. A dropper is 7 cobblestone and 1 redstone dust.
• Nine slots: a 3 by 3 grid. Click an empty slot to lock it, so nothing can go in.
• Filling: hoppers fill the open slots row by row, left to right. Once all are full, a new item goes onto the smallest stack of the same kind.
• Crafting: on a redstone signal it waits 4 game ticks, crafts one item and pushes it out of the front, into a chest or hopper if it faces one.
• Careful underneath: a hopper below a crafter takes out the ingredients, not the result.
• Ready signal: a comparator shows how many slots are locked or filled. Lock every slot your recipe doesn’t use, and 9 means ready. With a small circuit the crafter can then trigger itself.

Sort with copper golems instead

Copper golems arrived in Java 1.21.9, The Copper Age, on 30 September 2025, and they’re in Bedrock Edition too. Copper golem sorting needs no redstone at all. Put a carved pumpkin or jack o’lantern on a block of copper, with the pumpkin placed last. The copper block turns into a copper chest and the golem appears.

• Taking: it opens the nearest copper chest and takes up to 16 of the first item it finds.
• Putting away: it looks for a normal chest or trapped chest that is empty or already holds that item. It stops 3 seconds at every chest.
• Reach: 32 blocks around, but only chests at most 1 block above or 2 below it.
• Only chests: barrels, shulker boxes and items on the ground don’t count.
• Rough sorting: it ignores enchantments, damage and names. In Java it can’t tell potions or tipped arrows apart either.

Extra copper chests take 8 copper ingots around a normal chest. Without wax, each rust stage takes 7 hours to 7 hours 40 minutes, even when nobody is nearby. Fully rusted, the golem soon turns into a statue. Honeycomb stops that. A golem walks from chest to chest, so it’s slower than a hopper sorter.

Hoppers and lag on a server

A hopper with nothing on top looks for dropped items every game tick. A Minecraft server at CakeHosting runs Paper by default.

• Cover hopper lines. The wiki warns that long hopper lines may cause steady lag on a large scale. In Java, hoppers that only pass items along are lighter with a container or full block on top, and the composter works best.
• Only near players. Hoppers, pistons and observers only work within the simulation distance, 10 chunks by default in server.properties.
• Measure first. Use Spark to find lag before changing settings.

The first three settings below are in spigot.yml under world-settings, default. The others are in config/paper-world-defaults.yml under hopper.

The 8 matches the 8 game ticks a vanilla hopper waits. Change the transfer or amount values and every hopper on your server works at a different pace, so test your sorters afterwards. Loot from an XP farm can run through your sorter too.