Redstone Dust
Redstone dust is the wire of Minecraft. It carries a signal that starts at power level 15 and drops by 1 for every block it travels, fading to nothing after 15 blocks unless a repeater boosts it back up.
What is redstone dust?
Redstone dust is the wire that connects everything else. Place it on the ground and it forms a flat line of glowing powder that carries a signal from a source — a lever, button, torch, or block — to whatever you want to switch on. The brighter the dust glows, the stronger the signal it is carrying.
Dust automatically reaches out to connect to adjacent dust, to inputs and outputs of components, and even climbs up and down the side of solid blocks. That auto-connecting behaviour is what lets you route signals around a build without any extra glue.
How does dust lose power?
A signal entering a line of dust starts at the source's strength — usually 15 — and loses one level for every block it travels. So after one block it is 14, after two it is 13, and by the fifteenth block it has decayed to 0 and the dust goes dark. Anything beyond that 15-block reach gets nothing.
To send a signal further, you place a repeater, which resets the strength back to 15 and lets the line continue for another 15 blocks.
Why does my dust line stop at 15 blocks?
That 15-block limit catches almost every new builder. If the lamp at the far end never lights, count the blocks — the signal probably ran out. Drop a repeater somewhere in the middle to refresh it to full strength. The demo below carries a signal across a 10-repeater chain, far past what raw dust could ever reach.
Key facts
- Maximum signal range is 15 blocks; the signal drops 1 level per block travelled.
- Dust auto-connects to adjacent dust, component inputs/outputs, and climbs the sides of solid blocks.
- A solid block touched by powered dust becomes weakly powered — it can power components beside it but not push power into a second length of dust.
- A repeater resets the signal to
15and lets a line continue another 15 blocks. - Dust has no delay of its own — it propagates effectively instantly across its length.
Bedrock vs. Java: weak power
In Bedrock Edition, a solid block that is only weakly powered (for example, by dust running onto it) will not push that power back out into another separate piece of dust, and it will not flip a redstone torch attached to it. Weak power can still light a lamp or activate components placed directly against the block, but it stops there. This simulator follows that rule, so plan your wire routes with strong-versus-weak power in mind.