Building Item Transport Networks with Ducts

guide

This guide details how to build efficient item transport networks using Ducts. Ducts are a type of wooden pipe designed for moving items.

Crafting Ducts

To craft a Duct, combine two Oak Planks and one Iron Ingot in a crafting grid.

Duct Functionality

A Duct sends items into connected containers. It does not pull items from containers. Ducts ignore items dropped on the ground, meaning they will not pick up loose items.

Connecting Ducts

Ducts can be connected in chains to form longer transport lines. They function in any direction, including upwards, allowing for versatile item routing in your builds.

Other Hopper Gadgetry Components

While Ducts are central to item transport, other components can complement your system:

Grated Hopper: This item functions like a standard hopper but includes up to five filter slots. If no filters are set, it operates as a regular hopper.
Chute: A basic wooden hopper variant that only collects items from the ground. It does not store items; instead, it immediately passes them downwards into a connected container. Its only direction of transport is down.
Grated Hopper Minecart: This minecart offers the filtering capabilities of the Grated Hopper while moving on rails.
Chute Minecart: This minecart picks up items from the ground as it moves and transfers them directly to containers positioned below its path. It is useful for automated cleanup tasks.

Five items, six recipes, no blocks

The complete content of Hopper Gadgetry is five items and six crafting recipes, with no blocks of its own. Everything is placed from an item, and there is nothing further to unlock once those six recipes are made.

For a duct system that is good news: the parts list you are designing with is fixed and small, so a layout that works in one base transfers to the next.

Design before crafting

Because the component count is so low, the sensible order is to sketch the route first and craft to it. Ducts and chutes are about geometry rather than throughput tiers — there is no faster variant to upgrade into later, so the layout you build is the layout you keep.

It rests on vanilla hopper rules

Nothing here overrides how hoppers behave. Items still move on the vanilla timing, redstone still locks them, and the direction a component faces still decides where things go. The mod adds shapes vanilla cannot make, not new physics.