Tutorial:Shulker box storageShare article feedback

This tutorial is about loading and unloading shulker boxes for mass storage of items.

Uses

Loaders

If you have a farm that produces a lot of items, a shulker box loader can come in handy. It works by sending the input, commonly from item filters, into shulker boxes. Eventually, when a shulker box is full, the system fires - it locks one of the item input hoppers, destroys that shulker box with a piston, dispenses a new one then unlocks the input hopper back. The dispenser requires a input for shulker boxes in order for the machine to work constantly.

There are multiple variants of shulker box loaders and, mainly, there are 1-wide tileable designs and other designs that use droppers instead of hoppers in order to load shulker boxes a lot faster. However, faster loaders are optimized to farms that produces many items of less types and slower loaders are the opposite.

Important problems with 1-wide tileable loaders are:

• Depending on the layout and wiring, they can not always be reliable. When a shulker box is dropped as an item, it has a chance to be caught by the incorrect hopper because of the horizontal momentum it originally got, and this occurrence can be almost unidentifiable. A simple solution to this is to put a locked hopper beneath the shulker box and it must be unlocked exactly when the piston activates in order to achieve perfect reliablility. After a brief period of time, that hopper must be locked again.
• Hopper hashing ‌, which is the term used for the fact that, in a tick, hoppers are scheduled to function in a completely random order, which can completely break some shulker box loader designs. This happens when a player unloads then reloads the hoppers. (MC-96709) To solve this, there are 3 viable ways to read overflow with a redstone comparator:
  • Reading the shulker box (this doesn't require locking an input hopper and should detect only a signal strength of 15).
  • Reading the last hopper before the shulker box (this layout should detect only a signal strength of 2).
  • Reading the third last block before the shulker box and it must be a container block that isn't a hopper (this layout has the advantage to handle any type of item, regardless of max stack size. Can detect signal strengths of 1).

Unloaders

Shulker box unloaders are similiar to their loader counterpart, however they require only the shulker box input, allowing for more compact designs than loaders. Unloaders work by simply having a hopper below a shulker box to take out the items and, when that box is empty, we can identify that with a redstone comparator so that the piston can destroy it and the dispenser can place a new one. Keep in mind that the unloader receives two distinct output items (shulker boxes and other items being sucked out of them), meaning one should build a system that sorts that output.

The player might not find unloaders as useful, but they still have practical purposes. If the player's base has a storage system, then the player can come back from a long journey and dump an inventory-full of shulker boxes with various valuables into a chest. A system could then unload the shulker boxes and sort out the contents.

In an automatic tree farm, several shulker boxes with bone meal can be unloaded gradually to be used.

In a printer, especially 3D, it is easiest to program using shulker boxes to “write” the instructions and a shulker box unloader to “read” the instructions.

Minecarts with hoppers have an unique property - they can take 20 items away from container blocks every second, allowing one to create exceedingly fast shulker box unloaders, while still preserving shulker boxes. Be careful about the performance impact as minecarts with hoppers may cause a lot of lag, as they constantly check for various things every tick. There are also unloaders that burn shulker box items instead, causing them to instantly spit out its contents, which then get sorted by the system, however, in exchange of performance impact, this doesn't preserve shulker boxes, but with the existence of shulker farms, this method is more convenient.

Hoppers are laggy redstone components and locking them when the unloader is idle can benefit the performance. This is because hoppers, similiarly to minecarts with hoppers, check for many things every tick.

Search Engines

If you end up with chests full of random shulker boxes and you can't easily find the ones you need, you might want to start using a machine that uses a shulker box search engine.

With these machines, you can store your shulker boxes without worrying about sorting them or even the items within them.

The machine uses a filter to look for a specific item in the shulker boxes you have stored in your system until it finds a shulker box that contains the item you are looking for.

Designs

Loaders

Mumbo Jumbo's design

Mumbo Jumbo's loader [show] [edit]

YouTube Video (view on YouTube) [show]

Xisumavoid's design

Xisumavoid's loader [show] [edit]

YouTube Video (view on YouTube) [show]

Ilmango's design

Ilmango's loader [show] [edit]

YouTube Video (view on YouTube) [show]

Fortune's Combined Filter and Loader

Fortune's Combined Filter and Loader [show] [edit]

7axol's design

7axol's loader [show] [edit]

Combinations

Although hard to find, there are some designs that can load and unload with the same system, just pushing a few buttons to switch between the two "modes."

Search Engines

Another way redstone can aid shulker box storage is by making use of a so-called "Search Engine". This allows you to look for specific items in specific shulker boxes, even when the shulker boxes are stored in random order.

These machines can get complicated quickly, which is why there are few working designs out there.

Issues

MC-96709 — Hopper interaction is dependent on order of placement, and may break when reloading chunk — resolved as "Won't Fix".