How to Build a Deadly (But Practical) Minecraft Machine Gun

Have you ever felt like you wanted to totally annihilate someone in Minecraft with a machine gun? Yeah, me, too. Thankfully, you can!

The redstone machine gun, which I'll demonstrate, is essentially just a rapid pulsar attached to a dispenser full of arrows. This design has been around for awhile, but it's never been especially practical. After all, it'll eventually run out of arrows.

However, with Minecraft 1.3 coming up, that's about to change! In this tutorial, I'll show you how to use a machine gun as more than just a deadly weapon, but also a method for wireless redstone power!

Check out this video of the machine gun in action:

Rapid Pulsar

The heart of the machine gun is a simple rapid pulsar, as we discussed in this older article. If you can't figure out how to build one based on this picture, just check out that older post for a detailed tutorial!

The only difference in this case is that I've added a lever to the side of one of the blocks. This allows us to turn it on and off.

Attach a Dispenser

You can attach the dispenser at either end of the pulsar, but make sure it's pointing in the direction of your enemy! Additionally, I recommend adding a repeater, even if you don't need one. It helps stabilize the redstone current, and makes your machine gun fire more reliably. The delay setting you want will depend on how laggy (or not) your particular server is, so experiment with different settings.

Fill Your Dispenser with Arrows

Just stick a whole bunch of arrows in there, like so:

And that's it! You're ready to start unleashing machine gun mayhem!

However, if you want it to be a little more useful, there are some more steps.

You may notice that when you fire your machine gun that the arrows land in a pretty narrow band. Arrows will fire a minimum of 6 blocks, and a maximum of 12, and are spread across three block widths. However, the majority of the arrows will land in a spread that is 6 blocks long but only one block wide.

In Minecraft version 1.3, arrows will be able to trigger pressure plates, which means...

Put Down Pressure Plates

Voila! All of a sudden, you have a way to transmit wireless redstone power!

Since a few stray arrows will land outside of the strip of pressure plates, you will still need the rapid pulsar so that a single button-press will fire a few arrows. The odds of any one arrow in a set of three hitting a wooden pressure plate is, in my experience, 100%.

This means that when Minecraft 1.3 is released, you'll have a reliable way to transmit redstone power wirelessly 6 blocks! While it won't be as fast as plain old wire, it will be useful for those compact builds where you just can't get redstone across a hallway, or divide, or anything else without it being really ugly.

This will also work with redstone tripwires, which will probably be even more reliable than the pressure plates, so give that a try when 1.3 comes out!

If you have other machine gun or wireless redstone designs, create your own tutorials to show them off!