How to sort items faster in Minecraft 1.18

Minecraft players collect tons of items and materials during their time in a world, but keeping track of everything and organizing them can be a substantial pain.

Until items like bundles come along from future Mojang updates, Minecraft players have had to organize their materials and items as best they can. This can lead to a lot of storage chests. Players will also have to manually click and transition items to certain slots which can be very time consuming.

Fortunately, the Minecraft community has addressed this issue with the help of a few hoppers and some redstone, creating machines that automatically organize items into chests.

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Creating an auto sorter in Minecraft

Toss your items in the hoppers and watch as an auto sorter places the right items in the right chests (Image via Mojang)

With the creation of an automatic sorter, Minecraft players can simply drop items into a chest or hopper and watch as the items deposited are placed in specific chests that are marked for an item. Although this doesn't exactly allow for hybrid depositing and placing multiple items in one chest, it does allow players to easily access marked storage for a given item. The more receptacles that are built, the more materials Minecraft builders can store independent of each other.

There are a large variety of different builds to create an item sorter in Minecraft, with the complexity depending on a player's willingness to improve on the base design. However, those that are just beginning a new Minecraft world might only require a simple item sorter.

Below, players can find some steps to create a simple item sorter:

1. Build a 3x3 wall with wool, but remove the middle block and the top-right block.
2. Add a redstone repeater into the middle hole of the structure.
3. Add a redstone comparator on top of the top-left block. Run redstone dust wiring on top of the top-middle and top-right blocks.
4. Add a redstone torch to the side of the left-middle block, then place an additional wool block in front of it.
5. On top of the block placed in front of the redstone torch, place a chest.
6. Below the chest on the same block, place an item frame and insert the item desired to be sorted.
7. Add two hoppers, one connected to the chest and one connected to the redstone comparator.
8. Repeat the process until satisfied.
9. One block away from the furthest hopper in the build, create a floating double chest.
10. If the player has built many different sorting chests, create a chain of hoppers that feeds from the floating chest to the hoppers depositing into each sorter.

If players now place their Minecraft blocks and items into the floating double chest, they should be able to sort into the designated recepticles. However, readers should keep in mind that blocks that don't match the sorter will not be sorted into the chests.