Have you ever felt exhausted trying to sort all the items in your backpack to hundreds of chests in Minecraft? In the early game, this may not be a problem since you don't have much then. However, as the game progresses, you become a hoarder of materials, weapons, armors, and a rainbow of things in between. That's why you need an automatic item sorter system. It will make your life so much easier and save you a ton of time.

Item Sorter Minecraft
Once you've built this, you will never regret it!

Here's how to build an automatic sorter in Minecraft 1.17 Caves & Cliffs update.

How does an Automatic Item Sorter work?

As its name suggests, an automatic item sorter in Minecraft helps players to categorize their items automatically via the chest system. The mechanism functions like this:

  • You feed your items from your inventory to the Input chests.
  • The Input chests drop the items onto the Hoppers, then onto the conveyor belt.
  • All of the items will travel to each and every single chest in the system. When you leave at least one of the desired items, the correct ones will stack and stay there. In case the chest doesn't contain the exact same item, the system moves it along.
  • The process repeats until there are no items left in the system.
  • In case the system overflows or no chests are available, the items travel to the Output chest.
Item Sorter Minecraft Storage Room
Imagine how long it would take to sort all of these items normally.

How to build an Automatic Item Sorter in Minecraft 1.17

To design your own automatic item sorter, you need to prepare these required materials.

Input and Output Chests

  • 3 Smooth Stone Blocks
  • 2 Droppers
  • 4 Chests
  • 1 Dropper
  • 1 Redstone Comparator
  • 2 Redstone Repeaters
  • 7 Redstone Dust
Item Sorter Minecraft Water
There's another variant of the sorter that uses water.

Storage Chest (For 1 Double Chest)

  • 4 Smooth Stone
  • 2 Droppers
  • 2 Chests
  • 2 Hoppers
  • 1 Redstone Repeater
  • 1 Redstone Dust

Note: You should multiply the number of chests you want in the item sorter with the materials above to get the exact figure. 

When you have accumulated all of the required materials, building the item sorter will be fairly easy. Here's the detailed build by Mysticat. Follow the video and build your own contraption!

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