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I need to transport about 30 double chests of material about 1000 meters in single player minecraft.

I was thinking of building some sort of permanent transportation system to accomplish this.

I prefer dirt simple (but potentially resource heavy) contraptions over complicated "efficient" contraptions.

Because of this, I was thinking of just setting up a string of 1000 hoppers in a row, to move the material from one place to another.

My question: What will happen at the loaded/unloaded chunks with such a setup?

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I take back my earlier post.

Hoppers will transport items through unloaded chunks!

I've built another test pipe far away from spawn and made it really long (1000 hoppers). Now when i put an item in the first hopper, wait 5 minutes and then teleport to the end, the item will sit there in the last hopper. However if i put the item in the first hopper, then immediately teleport to the end and wait there, nothing happens. I waited for like 30 minutes but the item didn't arrive.

So apparently a hopper pipe can transport items into or through unloaded chunks, but there are certain limitations. I guess if a hopper tries to push an item into an adjacent unloaded chunk, minecraft will at least load the containers/hoppers of said chunk. So my test setup would cause something like a chain reaction of chunks getting loaded (at least partially, items still won't despawn in those chunks).

If i immediately teleport to the end however, minecraft will unload the chunk containing the item, so no hopper will try to load the next chunk.

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  • "Hoppers won't see hoppers in unloaded chunks as a valid source" is false.
    – BlaXpirit
    Jul 25, 2013 at 15:05
  • @BlaXpirit Hmmm, I guess that was a case I wasn't worried about. I'm wondering about the other case, does a hopper in a loaded chunk just fill up and not transfer to the unloaded chunk hopper?
    – John
    Jul 25, 2013 at 15:05
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    According to This video: youtube.com/watch?v=CdtUJobQaQ8 all sorts of things could cause a chunk to be loaded, but the only thing that can unload a chunk is a player who walks away from the loaded chunk. Jul 25, 2013 at 20:24

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