Hopper speed calculator
How long hoppers take to move a load of items, and how many hopper lines a farm needs to keep up.
- Time
- Items per hour
How to use it
Enter how many items you need to move and how many hoppers work side by side. The calculator shows how long it takes and how many items per hour that setup can move. Enter a farm's output per hour to see how many parallel hopper lines it needs.
How fast is a hopper?
A hopper moves one item every 8 game ticks, or 0.4 seconds:
| Time | Items moved by one hopper |
|---|---|
| 1 second | 2.5 |
| 1 minute | 150 |
| 1 hour | 9,000 |
A single chest of 1,728 items (27 stacks) takes about 11.5 minutes to empty through one hopper.
Chains and parallel lines
- A chain of hoppers is no faster than one. Items pass along at the same 2.5 per second no matter how long the chain is. Length only adds a short delay at the start.
- Parallel lines add up. Two hoppers feeding side by side move 5 items a second, ten move 25. To speed up a sorting system or a farm's collection, add more lines, not longer ones.
- Watch for overflow. If a farm makes items faster than its hoppers can move them, items pile up and eventually despawn. Enter the farm's output in the calculator above to size the collection system.
Faster options
Water streams and ice paths move dropped items much faster than hoppers and need no redstone. Many large farms use water to gather items into a few hoppers, then run several hopper lines in parallel into storage.