What does a daylight detector do in Minecraft?

In Minecraft, daylight detectors, commonly called daylight sensors, are widely used resources for Redstone engineers.

Daylight detectors are mainly only used in Redstone or as a decoration piece for builders. It is one of the many ways to generate Redstone power, which makes Redstone work.

Without any power, Redstone does not "turn on" in a sense, so nothing will work. There are many different ways to generate power, including buttons, pressure pads, Redstone torches, daylight detectors, and more.

Unlike resources like buttons and pressure pads, players do not need to actively press a daylight detector to generate power. It merely needs to be turned to sunlight mode and in the sun.

Daylight detectors in Minecraft

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Crafting a daylight detector

Crafting a daylight detector (Image via Minecraft)

Resources needed to craft a daylight detector:

• Three glass blocks
• Three Nether quartz
• Three wood slabs of any variety

Next, players must arrange the said materials above into a crafting table in the same way pictured above. This will then craft a daylight detector.

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Using a daylight detector

They can be used to create sophisticated projects (Image via Minecraft)

Shown above are three different daylight detectors in use. Two are in daylight mode, and one in nighttime mode. The latter is not powering the Redstone lamp because it is daylight, not nighttime.

Both the daylight detectors in daylight mode are powering the lamps. To turn a daylight detector back and forth between nighttime and daylight mode, players must right-click them.

While the Redstone project shown above is elementary, many different sophisticated projects use daylight detectors. This includes clocks powered by the exact time it is; timebombs that detonate TNT depending on the time of day; signals that, when combined with command blocks, can display announcements depending on the time of day; and more.

While daylight detectors are not very practical for the average Minecraft player, Redstone engineers have created many amazing, mind-blowing things using them.