you've probably seen the copper Ball by now the brand new block being added to Minecraft every Minecraft Youtuber known to man has posted their opinion on it but I want to offer a bit of a different perspective one from someone who doesn't make typical Redstone you see I don't make doors or Farms or flying machines I make what people call logical Redstone or computational Redstone I like to make games simulations computers basically anything that has to do with math or logic and when I saw the copper bulb I wondered does it make logical Redstone better so in this video I'm going to review the copper bulb but only from the perspective of logical Redstone and I'll show you why I probably won't be using it that much let's get started so what is a copper bulb it's a new block where if you power it it turns on and if you power it again it turns off it just toggles between two different states and you can read the state with a comparator when the bulb is on the comparator gives a full signal strength output and when it's off it gives nothing when it was first released it took one game tick to toggle but now in the latest snapshot it toggles instantly you might might think that's a positive change because it's getting faster but this has actually been a huge point of controversy because having a one game tick delay makes the copper bulb way more useful for a lot of redstone my friends crafty and purpler both made great videos explaining this if you want to check them out but I'm not going to talk about that because in logical Redstone honestly this change doesn't really matter having it be instant or one game tick doesn't affect how useful it is when building a game or a computer but for reference I'll be using the instant version of The Copper bulb for the entirety of this video so with that out of the way what do I think about this block well right off the bat I think this toggling property is pretty cool it makes the copper bulb a one block T flip flop T flip flops are used all the time in logical Redstone I just used one the other day while making mind sweeper so if I ever need a single T flip flop I think the copper bulb is undeniably the best way to go it's smaller and faster than any of the previous designs but what else can you do with this block well the first thing I saw a lot of people using it for is user interfaces for example let's say you have some settings in a redstone game where each one can be turned on or turned off this is typically done with levers and Redstone lamps you can turn on or turn off whatever settings you want and take an output from repeaters on the other side copper bulbs offer an alternative approach for this you can just have a row of bulbs with buttons on them and take the output using comparators just like the lamp design you can turn on or turn off whatever you want but when you compare these two designs I actually like the lamp version better because having a lever makes it immediately clear to the user that it's a togg they don't have to read any signs or anything they know just by the fact that it's a lever that it can only be on or off unlike a button where I don't know if this is a toggle or if it just sends a pulse somewhere or what also you might be wondering why not just put levers directly on the lamps like how these buttons are and that's because Redstone lamps are a solid block so powering one directly will power the ones around it whereas copper bulbs are transparent so they don't affect the ones around them but still I like the lamp design better simply because of what levers signify to a user another popular user interface is the button selector panel where only one selection is allowed at a time this right here is a design for it using lamps so if I press a button it turns that one on and if I press a different button it switches to that one and once again copper bulbs offer an alternative approach this design right here is by crafty and it's honestly pretty tiny it works just like the lamp version because it just switches to whatever button you press so in this case I actually think the copper bulb version is a little bit better it's smaller and it's more natural for a button select however me personally I wouldn't use either of these circuits in practice I think when a button selector panel becomes one wide per button it gets harder to understand I always have to spend a minute or two looking at The Observers and the droppers and reminding myself how it works so call me old if you want but when I need a button selector panel I like to use this which has been around for like 10 years it just uses dust repeaters and torches I feel like it's just easier to understand how this design works you can clearly see the SR latches on the bottom and how how all the resets are ored together yes it's two wide and not one wide but I actually think that's a good thing too because the data is more spread out and it's much easier to work with in general I try to find a balance between making my circuits small and readable and in this case I think the classic circuit is the winner the last type of user interface that's been really popular with the bulbs is a 2d screen where the player can essentially draw a picture so here I have a grid of bulbs with buttons and I can literally make whatever picture I want I don't think it was possible before to have one by one inputs and instant visual feedback so that's really cool I mean you could wire some buttons to a screen but copper bulbs are now an input and a screen combined Redstone lamps can't do that because again they're a solid block so this is really great if you want the user to be able to draw something on a screen however I would probably never use this for one simple reason it's one by one block per pixel if you want to do anything useful with this data like sending it to another screen or maybe running a Evolution on it then the data is way too close together you're going to end up having to use some circuit to either spread it out or serialize it so I would rather just use inputs that are already 2x two blocks in size this allows you to skip the step of spreading them out since they're already far enough apart you can just take the outputs directly with comparators and now that we're in a 2x2 situation I would rather use lamps because of the same reasoning from before levers signify toggles better than buttons the only problem with this is that it's harder to tell what the picture looks like since the display is more spread out for example this smiley face is way more clear than this one and there's no perfect solution for this but you can mitigate this problem by using a screen like this these are 2x two inputs where each input has a note block and three lamps around it to show you the status if I click a note block you can see that it toggles the three lamps around it so from a distance this makes the picture look a lot better I don't think it looks as good as a one by one picture but I think it's worth it to not have to do that extra wiring to spread it out so yeah this this whole thing was basically just a long way of saying that copper bulbs are really good for one by ones but I'll personally be sticking with 2x two lamp designs next let's talk about memory because everyone in their mom is making new copper bulb memory devices there are two main types of memory used in Minecraft read only memory and read write memory read only memory or ROM is pretty self-explanatory you can only read it this is used whenever you want to store something that doesn't need to be changed and when it comes to ROM I've yet to find a situation where the copper bulb can help I mean sure if you want to store one bit of information and read it later you can do that with a copper bulb and a comparator just cancel this comparator from the side and when you want to read it stop canceling the comparator if it's storing a one it'll read one and if it's storing a zero it'll read zero but you can also do this with a redstone block just place a redstone block to store a one or don't place it to store a zero or better yet use barrels barrels let you store any signal strength value from 0 to 15 which is an entire hex digit and there are even ways to store more information than that using shulker boxes so yeah I feel like ROM is a solved problem and copper bulbs don't really help but what about read write memory read write memory is different because you can read it or write to it there are a bunch of different ways to make this but the most common way to do it is with repeater locks for example this right here is one bit of read write memory you can write to it by putting the data here either a zero or a one and quickly unlocking and relocking the latch then you can read it by just uncan this comparator so I played around a little bit and tried making some read write memory designs with copper bulbs and I realized pretty quickly that copper bulbs are not the easiest thing in the world to write to for example if you want to write a one you might think that you can just hook it up like this and I wouldn't blame you because on the first time it looks like it writes a one but if the bulb is already a one then this doesn't write a one it writes a zero to actually write to a copper bulb you need to use an xor gate if the state of the bulb is the same as what you want to write you don't need to do anything but if the state of the bulb is different than what you want to write you need it to toggle so as you can see if the state of the bulb is zero and we want to write a one then the xor gate outputs one and it will toggle but now that they're the same one and one the xor gate outputs zero because it doesn't need to toggle so if we press right it just doesn't do anything this is why in my opinion copper bulbs are a terrible fit for read write memory because writing to them requires you to look at their own state but I didn't completely give up I tried my best to see if the copper bulb could improve some of the current best repeater lock designs for example this is a design for read write memory that I've used a bunch of times it's made up of eight copies of 8 bit modules so it has a total of 64 bits of memory and then this is my best attempt at making the same thing using copper bulbs it's noticeably bigger although not as big as I thought it was going to be the repeater lock design is 2x 2x9 per bit and the copper bulb design is 2X 2x13 and I guarantee someone else could make it even smaller I mean the repeater lock design is the result of years of development but the copper bulb hasn't even been out that long so it's totally possible that a future design would be smaller or faster and convince me to start using it but until then I'm just going to stick with repeater locks for memory because they don't need an ex orgate and they're a natural data latch however there is one thing copper bulbs have that repeater locks don't copper bulbs are movable which means you can do stuff like this this is a spinning read write memory which was definitely not possible before it even has a clear function which sets all the bits to zero as they kind of spin past this needle I probably wouldn't make anything like this for a logical Redstone build but I got to admit it's still really cool I absolutely love the creativity and look if copper bulbs being added means that people are going to make more creative builds then I'm a huge supporter I love seeing creative Redstone builds even if it's not my field next let's talk about another popular build a binary counter counter if you didn't know you can make a binary counter by chaining T flip-flops together this counter actually counts down so 3 2 1 Etc but if you want it to count up you can just invert all the outputs now it goes from 1 2 three you get the idea this is pretty cool because before the copper bulb you would have had to use a bigger T flip-flop design which made the counter a lot bigger and I think this is a fantastic way to demonstrate binary counting it's simple and intuitive but here's the thing if you're using a binary counter in a logical Redstone build you probably shouldn't use this design it's unsynchronized notice that if I start with all ones and press count the output ripples across and they all get there at different times again if you just want to play around with counting or show it to your friends then by all means this is a great way to do it but when it comes to using counters in a real build I typically use a synchronized design so that it doesn't cause problems later on and when it comes to synchronized designs the copper bulb doesn't really make them any better for example this is a synchronized 8bit counter using repeaters when I press this button it counts up and all the outputs arrive at the same time every time and this is the same thing using copper bulbs they're pretty much the same size now just like with memory someone is bound to make this design smaller copper bulbs haven't been around for that long but the thing is no matter how small this gets I probably still won't use it because there's another problem like I said before copper bulbs are annoying to write to which means it's annoying to reset this counter if I want this counter to go back to zero I have to read the state of all the bulbs whereas with the repeater design you can just unlock all the repeaters and flush them out in fact with a little more modification you can write anything to this repeater lock counter not just a zero with this design I can put in a seven for example press right and now I can start counting up from Seven then I can put in a zero press right again and now I can count up from zero just for fun I went ahead and tried making a copper ball bu version anyways and this is what I came up with and it works the exact same way you can write stuff to it or count up but it's a lot bigger and again I bet someone will make a smaller one but for now I'm sticking with the repeater lock design to avoid those annoying exors finally let's talk about how copper bulbs are used in screens since copper bulbs hold their state you can make a perfectly flat screen with anything you want on it this isn't possible with redstone lamps because you would need to power them from behind so that's pretty cool I might actually use this another cool thing you can do with them is this I saw this in a Mumbo Jumbo Video it kind of looks like the screen is flipping between light mode and dark mode this was possible with just Redstone lamps although it was a lot more complicated but beyond these small display tricks I'll probably never use copper bulbs for an actual logical Redstone build because they're extremely difficult to reset sure they're pretty easy to draw something onto but once you draw it the only way to get rid of it is to draw it again to reset the screen you have to access the bulbs exor them with zero and then wire that back into the screen which is pretty much impossible there just isn't enough room so this is pretty annoying for most of my builds when you have a screen hooked up to a game or a computer being able to reset it is extremely important also I feel like using lamps is just more natural when you have things moving on the screen for example when I made Flappy Bird I used this circuit to resemble the bird it falls along these torches like it has gravity and when you press this button it jumps so when you put a lamp screen on it of course it looks pretty good the lamps are just mirroring whatever is on the Torches a copper bulb screen doesn't work like this copper bulbs just toggle themselves they don't actually mirror anything so the circuitry has to get more complicated to make up for that because now when you want to move something you not only have to power the new place but also power the old place to turn it off so copper bulbs are just not ideal for this another way to put this is that I don't want my screen to have state if I need State I'll build it with redstone but a screen in my opinion should just help show what the Redstone is doing that's it now do I think there are games where a copper bulb screen makes more sense absolutely for example lights out is perfect for copper bulbs because it's all about toggles it's just that in general I think lamps are much better because they display the Redstone directly but what about color screens could those be improved with the copper bulb this actually gets brought up a lot because copper bulbs come in four different variations each with a different color so people have thought of using these for the red green and blue of an RGB screen and then this is a good idea but unfortunately it doesn't work very well in practice RGB screens work because each color red green and blue has 256 different brightness levels so by changing these brightnesses it tricks your brain into seeing different colors when it's really small but copper bulbs only have two brightness levels on and off so the most colors you're going to get out of a copper bulb screen is eight two * 2 * 2 for reference here's what that looks like it's okay it looks better with the texture pack at least but it's still copper bulbs so good luck resetting the screen or using it for a game the good news is there were already plenty of better options for RGB screens one option is to have a bunch of red green and blue concrete and cover up different amounts of them using trap doors my friend torb actually used this on his computer here's how it looks while playing Tetris another option is to use maps these have 64 color choices and they look pretty good here's my friend crafty using them for mind sweeper and for a third option you can use a texture pack to change each red stone dust signal strength into a different color here's my friend mod punch Tre using this in his computer so if I ever need an RGB screen I'm just going to use one of these options which in my opinion are all better than copper bulbs I really don't want you guys to get the wrong idea about this video overall I still think adding copper bulbs to the game was a great idea I'm a fan of it they invoke creativity they expand the options for what's possible and they've got people talking about Minecraft more which is always a good thing it's just that I personally won't be using them much and I hope this video did a decent job explaining why I hope you learned something I hope you enjoyed peace out [Music] guys