Ultimate Guide to Mastering Command Blocks!: Minecraft Keys to Unlocking Secret Commands

Introduction

There comes a time in every Minecraft player’s experience when they hit the limit of what can be done with pickaxes, pistons, and the ever faithful Redstone.

After hours of play and designing a world that moves and shakes to the beat of your automated note-block symphony, you might start to pine for a different kind of creative power. A power to give you the freedom to make marvels and pull off effects you might not have ever dreamed of once upon a time.

Enter Minecraft’s most powerful block to date.

We call her the command block, and she’s the mother of all other blocks before her. With this new addition to the game it’s possible to upgrade your play style—no more tackling things a block at a time. The power to affect and change your whole world and all the moving parts and mobs in it becomes yours.

FUN FACT:

Command blocks can be used to summon or kill any mob in the game. You can even name some entities and change how they behave in the world. Want an armored zombie as a body guard to follow you around? Go for it! Want to sit back and watch a giant Wither Boss fight the End Dragon? Well grab some popcorn because it’s possible!

These blocks have multi-functionality that lets it affect any and all you can think of in your Minecraft game world so long as you have the right command in mind. We’ll provide a list of commands (it’s gigantic) and the effects you can achieve depending on which ones you use.

Have you ever wanted a secret door to your base that looks just like the wall surrounding it? Even better have you ever wanted it to open automatically and have it open just for you? How about a security system for your base that can tell when a stranger is invading and turn the entire floor in an area to lava as a security measure? Or perhaps an entire structure summoned with the flick of a switch only to disappear again when that same switch is turned off? All this and more is possible with the use of command blocks and as you can imagine it can be anywhere from the simplest command like giving you an item, to affecting an entire area all at once and completely changing the landscape.

It’s even possible to combine the use of more than one command block at a time to create some never before seen Rube Goldberg device to trap or confuse enemies with hilarious results or even just to watch your creation move and unfold before you at the touch of a button.

The list of commands and possibilities for using command blocks isn’t endless but it is fairly massive, and while the learning curve isn’t as steep as the gigantic list might make you think, it’s still there. So we’ll start off with the basics, and work our way up to the more advanced commands the command block is capable of performing.

Eventually we’ll lead you into using multiple command blocks at the same time to achieve amazing feats of Minecraft engineering that would be impossible otherwise.

For now, without letting the size be too daunting, we suggest to take this tutorial at a steady and even pace. There isn’t a time crunch—this book isn’t going anywhere, but learning some of the heavier stuff dealing with command blocks does take a basic understanding of how they work and how to achieve desired results with the right commands. It won’t be instant, but by the end of this book you should be very familiar with command blocks and how to use them to suit your plans. So much so that you might even find yourself taking what you’ve learned and coming up with new ideas that aren’t even in this book! That’s how many different ways to use command blocks exist, there is such a variety of methods and combinations to use, that this book would be the size of a dictionary if we could add them all!

Saying that, even after reading, we would suggest that it might be a good idea to go out and seek other means of educating yourself on the subject, from watching videos to watching over the shoulder of a more experienced player. Even playing with command blocks yourself with a list of commands in front of you will give you pivotal experience to help you on your way.

The name of the game here is getting you to where you want to be in your understanding of how command blocks work and how to get them working for you. If you decide you need to seek out another resource or two to help with that, then all the power to ya!

Our goal within the pages of this book is to cover as much information as we can on command blocks and the commands they use so you don’t lose your way when you try it out for the first time.

What to Expect

For the purposes of this book we’re going to be looking at command blocks and the commands that you can use with them within the confines of a single player creative world setting. Though most of these commands will be used more often in a multiplayer server, this is because in a server there are more players who cannot use chat based commands compared to those who can. This book will be sequential, as we move forward, each new section will cover material under the assumption you have read the material of the previous sections.

It’ll start simple, we’ll need to cover all of the basics before moving onto anything more complicated because to do any of the major projects involving command blocks you’ll need at least a basic understanding of how to write out the easy stuff first. Things like basic summoning of items and mobs and moving around blocks a certain way will pave the way for you to learn the more complicated command block setups and help you to think up new ways of using them all your own.

We’ll be using a fair bit of terminology as well, words and phrases that, prior to reading this book you might not be familiar with so we’ll have a section that explains them all. That way at any point throughout your reading of this book if you get stuck on a term you haven’t seen before, you can just flip back a few pages and learn about it.

After the basics are learned and you know where to go looking for anything you might not be familiar with, we’ll demonstrate various setups with command blocks and different ways of using Redstone to activate them as well as using multiple command blocks and Redstone set ups at the same time in some advanced builds.

FUN FACT:

With the say command you can make it seem like anyone at all has joined your game! Fool your friends in chat and have a laugh when some big Minecraft names join your game only to be nowhere to be found despite the best efforts of the other players! (see our gallery)

What Are Command Blocks

The command block, like its name suggests, is a block in Minecraft all about commands. Each command you give to a command block is, in a sense, giving a command to the server, telling it to do something.

The only difference here being that the thing executing the command is the block, and it can continue to execute any command long after the server admin or creative player that spawned it is gone. Not long ago there was only one type of command block in the game but with the advent of the 1.9 update, there are now 3 types of command blocks at your disposal to conquer your Minecraft experience like never before.

These new types of command blocks aren’t exactly extra items added in the game, but instead what they’ve done is add extra functionality to the original command block.

Now via interaction with the new improved interface of the classic (or Impulse) command block, you can change it into one of two new types, the Chain command block and the Repeating command block, each with their own functionality separate from that of the original.

While a classic command block will activate its command with a Redstone signal, with the chain variation (the green one), it is possible to place multiple command blocks down in a line (much like placing down lines of Redstone) and have them react in order, one after the other.

The repeating command block (purple) was created to automatically activate itself over and over instead of having to use Redstone to achieve the same effect. Don’t panic though, Redstone will still be a big part of working with command blocks regardless of these innovations.

As you might guess, because of the variety of different ways to set up a Redstone system, you could still have a command block continuously executing a command automatically by using Redstone.

So if you want a command block to summon a cow every few minutes, you can do it. If you wanted a block of diamond to suddenly appear out of nowhere at the push of a button, that’s possible too. If you wanted to design a bridge to cross a ravine that disappears periodically these command blocks are your tool to use.

But wait, there’s more!

Not only can command blocks work for making physical changes to your Minecraft world and summoning blocks, items, or mobs, but they can also function as brains or radars. What this means is that as well as summoning all those things, they can also detect anything you tell them to, and if you so choose, react to anything that it detects via a Redstone signal.

Basically if you place down a command block and tell it to look out for say, a creeper, you can have the block act as