How to activate a piston in Minecraft

Pistons can be very useful in Minecraft. They can be used to create automatic farms, secret doors or other fun hiding places.

There are two types of pistons and each one has a different use: sticky pistons are great for pushing a block forward and pulling it back and regular pistons are good for just pushing something forward (or breaking it, in the case of an automatic sugar cane farm or something like that).

While there are two different types of pistons that serve various purposes, they are crafted similarly and are used the same way. Here's how to activate a piston in Minecraft.

Pistons in Minecraft

First things first: crafting a piston is one of the only ways to acquire one. There are pistons used in Jungle Temples but so far that is the only place that players might be able to find one in the world without it being placed by another player.

Huh it's funny when the jungle temple spawns in the desert 😂 😂 😂 pic.twitter.com/gcsBVdKzIU

— CRABIKPLAY (@crabikplay) July 13, 2021

Jungle temples are rare and usually very difficult to find, so crafting one remains the best way of acquiring them. The crafting recipe isn't too complicated, but mining will likely be necessary to complete it.

A piston requires three wooden planks, four cobblestones, one iron ingot and one redstone dust. Iron and redstone can be found pretty commonly in other ways, but mining is the best way to get both.

Minecraft piston recipe. Image via Windows Central

Once one is crafted, it can be turned into a sticky piston with just one item: a slime ball. Slime balls are hard to come by as they will need to be earned from killing a slime.

Slimes commonly spawn in certain wide-open chunks deep underground and, more commonly, in swamp biomes.

After crafting the pistons and setting them up for their intended uses, the last step is to simply activate them. Like all "technology" in Minecraft, pistons require a redstone charge to work.

This can be from a lever, a button, an observer or just a redstone block. Placing a redstone block under or beside the piston will leave it activated permanently.

Activating a piston. Image via YouTube

A button and observer will give a brief charge that is enough to trigger the piston, but it will return to its normal position shortly thereafter. A lever will activate the piston until the former is switched again.

If an observer is used, a piece of redstone dust will be needed to connect the piston to the observer for it to work.

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