Pistons

This mod was eventually added to the game as the piston.

This mod adds pistons. Pistons can be extended and retracted with redstone.

Pistons will extend when powered by redstone, and retract when unpowered. When placed, the block will face towards you. You can re-orient them by right-clicking. Pistons will push blocks in front of them. They will not push bedrock, obsidian, or other pistons. They will also not push more than 16 blocks.

Pistons will push entities out of their way, so that they can be used to make launchers. If sand or gravel is pushed upward by a piston, it will fly into the air.

Pistons will block the flow of water or lava. They will also push blocks added from other mods.

Changing the data values

There have been problems with the default data values for the blocks (100 and 101) conflicting with other mods, so I added a way to change the values.


 * Go to the root Minecraft directory (the one that contains the bin, resources, saves, and texturepacks folders).
 * Create a directory called "mods" if it does not already exist.
 * In that directory create a file called "pistondv.txt"
 * The contents of this file should be one line, containing the data value for the piston base.

Important: the mod uses the value you enter into the file and the one after it. For example, if you have "115" in the file, then the mod will use 115 for the base and 116 for the extended part. If you open up ModLoader.txt (in the root Minecraft directory), then you will see something like:

which you can always use to tell what data values the mod is using.

If you change the data value, all pistons that you've placed in the world will disappear! You have been warned!

New in this version Support for 1.5_01, mainly. I removed the ability for pistons to boost minecarts when one block above the minecart, because you can do the same thing with powered rails. Also, I re-added the multi-launch bug.

Bugs - These will be fixed soon! When the bottom of a stack of sand is pushed, the block above it will be destroyed (engine bug). Pushing a minecart at on the side does weird things. Certain setups will cause the extended part of the piston to disappear, which makes the piston useless. While being pushed, blocks will always render as cubes with the same texture on all side (low priority). Making the extended part handle being destroyed more gracefully.

Planned features Support for pushing other pistons Pistons that can pull blocks as well as push them