How to Make a Trapdoor Drawbridge

Trapdoors have many different uses in Minecraft, but there is none cooler than a drawbridge. No castle or luxurious house is complete without a line of defense before the entrance.

First off, find a nice flat area for your drawbridge.

Then hollow it out a bit so you can make the trap portion of the drawbridge. If you don't want to make some kind of death pit, just dig out one block deep.

Next, build up one block above ground level. Trapdoors attach at the bottom of the block they're stuck to, so attaching them to a block one level higher than the ground puts them at the same level as you.

Now attach your trapdoor to the blocks on the side.

When you're done it should look like this.

Now, place redstone dust on top of all the blocks on the side. Note that redstone currents only travel 15 spaces, so make your drawbridge 13 spaces long or less.

Connect the wire to a lever at one side of the drawbridge.

When you flip the lever, all of the trapdoors come up.

You can do whatever you want with the drawbridge pit. You can make it into a deep pit, fill it with water, keep a creeper down there, or my personal favorite, lava.

Here's the final version I made out of sandstone for my house.

Pistons Coming Early

Notch announced today that 1.7 would be launched Thursday, but would only contain pistons and some bug fixes. The website has already been updated with the new piston and sticky piston recipes, but you won't be able to make them until Thursday.

Also, I am currently working on a mobile version for the site. It will have much more of a wiki-esque feel to it and should be easier to navigate than the current site on your phone. Down the road when I get some more programming experience the plan is to make it into an app so you don't even have to tab out of your Minecraft window to check what you need. So look out for that and enjoy 1.7.

How to Make Double Doors

Say you want to make a nice doorway with 2 doors. A pressure plate will only open one door at a time, and manually clicking 2 doors to enter your house can be annoying. There's a simple fix to this problem using redstone. With a little redstone wire and a redstone torch, you can make it so that one pressure plate opens 2 doors at once. This method works with both wooden and iron doors and stone or wood pressure plates.

First, set up your double doors. Make sure that both doors are hinged on the outside blocks instead of the edge of the other door.

Place a pressure plate on both sides of one of the doors.

Dig a hole underneath the doorway.

Place a redstone wire on the block below the pressure plate.

Place a redstone torch on the side of the block next to the wire. Technically the torch will be filling the block below the door that has no pressure plate.

Put another redstone wire underneath the other pressure plate.

Fill the hole up and both doors will open from one pressure plate.