How Fast Is a Hopper?

Quick answer

• A hopper moves 2.5 items per second. That's 150 a minute and 9,000 an hour.
• It fills a whole chest in about 11.5 minutes.
• Power it with redstone and it stops moving items.
• Need it faster? A Minecart with Hopper pulls from a chest up to 8 times faster on Java.

Hoppers are the pipes of Minecraft. Every farm uses them, but they are slower than most players think. Here's how fast they really are, and how to stop a busy farm from backing up.

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What a hopper does

Craft one from 5 iron ingots and a Chest. It holds 5 slots of items.

A hopper does three jobs at once:

1. Pulls items out of the container above it.
2. Collects items dropped on top of it.
3. Pushes items into the container its spout points at.

How fast is a hopper?

After every item it moves, a hopper waits 8 game ticks (0.4 seconds). That works out the same on Java and Bedrock.

Filling up	Items	Time with one hopper
Hopper	320	2 min 8 s
Chest	1,728	11 min 31 s
Double chest	3,456	23 min 2 s

Making a hopper chain longer doesn't make it faster or slower. Every hopper in the line still runs at 2.5 items a second.

Why your farm backs up

If a farm makes more than 9,000 items an hour, one hopper can't keep up. Items pile up on the floor and start to despawn after 5 minutes.

The fix is to split the drops across more hoppers, each feeding its own chest. A farm making 20,000 items an hour needs at least 3 hoppers running side by side.

The fast option: hopper minecarts

A Minecart with Hopper pulls items out of a container above it much faster than a normal hopper.

It can also pick up items through one layer of solid blocks, so you can hide it under a floor. Run it over a powered Activator rail to switch its hopper off.

Turning a hopper off

Give a hopper a redstone signal, from a Lever or a Redstone torch, and it stops pulling, pushing and collecting. Other hoppers can still feed items into it, and it still lets items be pulled out from below.

This is how item sorters work. A Comparator reads how full a hopper is, and a redstone torch locks it until the right amount builds up.

Cheat sheet

• Speed: 2.5 items a second, 9,000 an hour
• One chest takes about 11.5 minutes to fill
• Farm making more than 9,000 an hour? Use more hoppers
• Hopper minecart: 20 a second on Java, 10 on Bedrock
• Redstone signal = hopper switched off

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