Explosives — Black Powder & the Blasting Keg

The demolition tier. You make Black Powder the real way — from Sulphur, Coal, and Saltpetre — pack it into a wooden Blasting Keg, light the fuse, and get clear. Light it by hand or wire it to Electricity for remote and trap detonations.

New to it? Do the hands-on lesson first: Light a Blasting Keg. This page is for looking things up.

The one rule: demolition, not mining

A blast breaks blocks but gives you no drops from them — and no Proof-of-Play hash. The careful pickaxe strike is still the only way to actually collect ore (and, on Bitcoin servers, to earn). So you can blow a tunnel, but you forfeit whatever was in the wall. Ore never drops from a blast.

The supply chain — three ingredients

Black Powder is the real ~75/15/10 gunpowder recipe. Two of the three ingredients you already know; this tier adds the third and finally gives Sulphur a home.

Ingredient	Where it comes from
Sulphur	Mine Brimstone (yellow-green crystal ore) with a stone pickaxe or better → 1–2 Sulphur.
Coal	You already have it — mined the normal way. (Charcoal is planned but doesn't exist as an item yet.)
Saltpetre	Two ways (pick either): mine a Nitre deposit (pale white-grey ore, stone pickaxe+), or farm it in a Composter (below).

Saltpetre the farming way — the Composter

A Composter is a slatted wooden bin. Right-click it with plant/food waste (seeds, crops, saplings) a few times to fill it; wait, then right-click with an empty hand to collect Compost. Feed the Compost back in, wait again, and it ages into Saltpetre — the real "nitre bed" chemistry. A miner and a farmer both reach the keg by their own route.

The recipes

Open the recipe book (it shows both), or craft by hand:

Make	Recipe	Yield
Black Powder	Sulphur + Coal + Saltpetre in a row (any order)	3
Blasting Keg	8 Planks ringing 1 Black Powder in the middle (any wood)	1

The Keg is our own barrel — never a red lettered cube. The middle ingredient is what tells it apart from a Chest (empty middle = Chest).

Get any of these for testing with /give <name> in chat: brimstone, nitre_ore, composter, blasting_keg, sulphur, saltpetre, black_powder, compost, magnesium_firestarter.

Lighting the fuse

A lit keg burns a ~4-second fuse, then detonates in place — enough time to get clear. There are two ways to light it:

By hand — right-click the keg with the Magnesium Firestarter.
By Electricity — the keg is a power sink: a fresh power signal lights the same fuse (see below).

A keg caught inside another blast chain-ignites — line a few up for a cascade.

Wiring it to Electricity

The keg plugs straight into the Electricity tier — it's just a consumer on the network, lit by a rising edge (an off→on pulse). It fires once per pulse, not continuously, so a held-on wire won't keep re-triggering.

Plunger Detonator — the hero input: a boxed T-handle. Push it → a pulse runs down the cable → every wired keg lights. Craft it from 1 Iron Ingot + 1 Copper Cable (the material, not the placeable Cable block) + 1 Oak Plank in a horizontal row (iron casing, cable contact, plank base — "a boxed switch").
Cables fan out — one plunger pulse can light many kegs at once for synchronised demolition. No wire length limit.
Any Spec 48 trigger works — a Pressure Plate (step-on trap), a Beam Sensor tripwire (walk through the beam), a Motion Sensor (proximity), a Lever or Button. The keg is a standard sink, so they all just work.
Arming (safety) — wire Lever AND trigger → keg through a Logic Gate (AND): the charge only fires when your arm lever is on and the trigger trips. Real circuit design, no special keg setting.

The blast

Radius — a spherical ~4 blocks (tunable). Soft terrain, stone, wood and ore all go.
Blast-proof blocks — Bedrock and Satori are immune; deepslate and packed metal/gem blocks shrug off a single keg. Your world floor and the toughest blocks hold.
Damage — players and mobs in range take damage that falls off with distance, and hiding behind a wall (line of sight) softens it. Stand back, or duck behind cover. Armour helps too — blast damage is reduced by your equipped armour like any other hit (and wears it accordingly).
No fire spread — detonation doesn't start spreading fire (kid-friendly + anti-grief).

Where it won't go off

Explosives are a trigger, not a bypass — the no-drop rule holds however a keg is fired, and a couple of switches turn it off entirely:

explosives_enabled = false — a per-world toggle (off→ a keg just fizzles, breaks nothing, hand-lit or electrical).
Adventure / Spectator — read-only modes: a keg can't break blocks.
Creative — place + detonate freely.

Want the deep version (how it's built, the industrial ANFO route, fireworks)? That's the spec: docs/foundations/2026-06-20-explosives-blasting-keg.md.