A compact, save-persistent redstone board inside a single block.
Redstone gets unwieldy fast: a working contraption covers a dozen chunks, is destroyed by any build mistake, and nobody can hand it to a friend. Redstone PCBs puts the whole circuit on a 16×16×16 voxel board held in one block. Build it in place, save it to your Library, and place it anywhere.
Right-click a PCB to open the editor. The board is a 16×16×16 voxel grid shown in an orthographic 3D view.
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Drag | Orbit |
Ctrl + drag |
Pan |
Ctrl + scroll |
Zoom toward the cursor |
| Scroll wheel / layer buttons | Step the active layer |
| Wheel over the palette | Scroll the palette |
| Left-click | Place the selected item |
Shift + left-click |
Erase |
| Right-click | Use the hovered block |
R |
Rotate the hovered block (or the pending facing) |
G |
Assign a container's gateway face |
P |
Tap the hovered glass cell in (redstone) |
Shift + P |
Tap it out (redstone) |
View presets are two rows (NE/SE/SW/NW/Top, N/E/S/W) and Reset recentres the view. The active layer is outlined, and Pulse Layer toggles every lever and presses every button on that layer. The palette is a creative-style 9×3 icon grid with tabs and a search box.
The board is a real-block sandbox: any block item can be placed, not just the classic redstone set — redstone, torch, repeater, comparator, block of redstone, lever, button, stone, glass, lamp, observer, note block, hopper, furnace, blast furnace, smoker, brewing stand, crafter. The palette is a tabbed selector (Search, Building Blocks, Redstone, Functional, Ingredients) sourced from the live creative-tab contents. In creative every placeable item is offered; in survival only items you hold. Placing consumes the item and removing it refunds (blocks refund their item, so redstone dust refunds correctly). The PCB itself appears in the vanilla Redstone Blocks creative tab.
The circuit lives as real blocks in an empty, void world the mod registers at server start. It is registered in code, never as a datapack entry, so it adds no worldgen and never triggers an experimental-settings warning.
Boards are laid out one per chunk on a stride-2 grid, so each has a clear one-chunk border on all sides (including diagonals). The board's own chunk is held ticking so redstone runs with no player nearby, and the border chunks are held loaded without ticking. Breaking a board packs the region back into the PCB item; placing it writes it back.
The dimension's height is a code parameter, so taller boards can be enabled later.
A board has two taps: at most one in and at most one out, and both can exist at the same time, so a single block can take a signal and drive one.
A tap is a glass or tinted glass block placed in the gap beside the component you want bridged —
not on it. Vanilla redstone never reads a block's own position to decide its power (a wire calls
getBestNeighborSignal, a lamp calls hasNeighborSignal, a diode reads the cell behind it), so a
component on the tap cell itself would see nothing. Beside it, it reads the tap as an ordinary
neighbour and behaves exactly as it would anywhere else.
The tap does not decay the signal — whatever reads the tapped cell gets the full level it carries, at any distance, exactly as a block of redstone hands out 15 to all six of its sides. That is a property of the tap only, not a licence: from the component onward the signal is whatever vanilla does with it, so a dust run leading away from a tap still loses 1 per block and a repeater is needed to put the level back, exactly as in any other circuit. A tap is one full-strength source at one point, not a lossless wire.
Press P on a glass cell to tap it in, or Shift+P to tap it out — the direction is chosen,
never inferred, so a board can be output-only, input-only, both, or neither. Press the same key again
to clear the tap, or the other one to flip it. Assigning a direction another cell already holds moves
it, and the editor names the cell that lost its tap.
Taps persist on the block, travel with the PCB item, and are carried by saved and shared designs. Item gateways are a separate mechanism and are not affected by any of this.
Place a furnace, blast furnace, smoker, brewing stand, crafter or hopper inside the board and right-click one in the editor to open its UI.
The board exchanges items with world hoppers through the PCB block. The gateway is manual: hover
an in-board container (a block with inventory slots) in the editor and press G to assign it to a
PCB face; press G again to step to the next free face, and once more past the last face to clear it.
A face can be held by only one container and a container by only one face; the editor only offers faces that are still free, so clear one before moving another container onto it. The assigned PCB face is highlighted in the 3D view while attached. A container with no assigned face is not reachable from the world at all. Non-containers cannot be assigned.
| Face | What it does |
|---|---|
| Bottom | An in-world hopper attached under the PCB pulls from the assigned container. |
| Top | The block above the PCB may be a container; the board pulls down from it. |
| Sides | Feed the assigned container from a hopper attached to that side. |
The PCB face only decides whether the container is reachable, not which of its slots accepts or
yields a transfer. Placing, clearing or rotating a cell clears its attachment (rotate it, then re-press
G). Items crossing the gateway also notify the in-board container, so comparators and neighbours
reading it update in the board dimension on both loaders.
Attachments persist on the block and travel with the PCB item when it is carried. This is the item gateway and it is independent of the redstone taps: a board can move items, carry a signal in, or drive one out, and the two mechanisms do not interfere.
The editor's Library panel keeps named circuits per player, stored with the world.
A design's name is typed in the panel's name field. Save costs one paper in survival, and loading a
design back onto a board consumes the matching items in survival. The per-player limit is maxDesigns
in config/redstonepcbs.json (default 16), so single-player and creative worlds can raise it.
| Button | What it does |
|---|---|
| Exp | Exports a design as JSON to redstonepcbs/blueprints/<name>.json inside the game folder — so it lands in the player's own files, on a server or single-player. |
| Import | Reads blueprint files back from there. |
| Share | Pushes a saved design straight into another online player's library, stamped with your name; it appears in their list as an ordinary editable entry. |
A blueprint is a small JSON document (name + base64 grid + gateway attachments + redstone taps), so designs can be copied between worlds and players with their porting intact; older files still import, just without the sections they predate.
Importing is free (no paper) but still counts against the per-player limit; set allowImport to
false in the config to disable it.
config/redstonepcbs.json, shared by both loaders.
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
maxDesigns |
16 |
Named designs one player may keep in their Library. Clamped to 1–4096. |
allowImport |
true |
Whether blueprint files may be imported into the Library. |
Only the server side reads the values that affect play; the client reads the file too when listing blueprints.
| Minecraft | 1.21.1 |
| Loaders | Fabric (Loader + Fabric API) or NeoForge 21.1.235+ |
| Java | 21 |
| Side | Client & Server |
The jar is universal — the same file works on both Fabric and NeoForge (it holds the loader-specific builds inside and each loader loads only its own copy).
Drop redstonepcbs-<version>-universal.jar in mods/. There is one mod, so there is nothing to
combine and no companion jar to install.
Install Fabric Loader + Fabric API, or NeoForge 21.1.235+, for Minecraft 1.21.1 first.
The universal jar is on CurseForge/Modrinth. If you want a single-loader build
(redstonepcbs-<version>-fabric.jar / -neoforge.jar), grab it from
GitHub Releases.
This project's own source code is licensed under Apache-2.0.
Retired Roca
