A piston extends a physical head one block when its base receives power. It can push a line of up to eight eligible solid blocks, provided there is room at the far end. A sticky piston also tries to pull one eligible block back when it retracts.
Craft and place one
The piston recipe makes one base from three oak planks across the top; cobble / iron ingot / cobble in the middle; and cobble / copper ingot / cobble across the bottom. The sticky upgrade is tree resin above a piston in a vertical pair. See the item pages for the exact grids and accepted material substitutes.
Normal placement chooses a horizontal direction from the direction you are looking. To choose the placement-face direction instead, hold Shift while placing. Placing against a block's top face while holding Shift makes an upward-facing piston; placing against the underside makes a downward-facing one. Its head extends away from the placement face. Check the front before connecting fuel or power.
Aim at a floor or support cell when placing neighboring circuit parts. Right-clicking an existing lever toggles it and right-clicking a dynamo inspects or refuels it before ordinary placement gets a chance to run.
A one-block pusher
Arrange a top-view line on a clear, flat test area:
Dynamo — Lever — Conduit — Piston → Oak plank — Empty cell
The piston should face away from the conduit, toward the plank. The conduit connects to the piston base, not to the loose plank. Give the dynamo Coal, stand out of the push lane, and turn the lever on. The piston head occupies the plank's old cell and the plank moves into the empty cell.
Turn the lever off. A normal piston removes its head and leaves the plank where it was pushed. Repeat with a sticky piston: switching off removes its head and pulls the adjacent eligible plank back into the head's old cell. Sticky retraction pulls one block, not a whole train of blocks.
This is the basis for a movable wall panel or a one-block platform demonstration. Use ordinary movable building blocks for the panel, rather than trying to move an existing door block.
Blocks that stop a push
The push routine accepts ordinary solid blocks and rejects protected or special structures. Examples of immovable blocks include basalt, chests and vaults, building decks and kilns, beds, bookshelves and chemical workbenches, doors and gates, writing-related fixtures, other machinery, and plants. Non-solid decorative blocks are not ordinary pushable solids either. Water and empty space can serve as the open end of a push, but water is not a block carried as part of the train.
If a chain is too long, includes an immovable block, crosses into an unloaded chunk, goes beyond the allowed vertical world interior, or has a player/animal/resident in a checked destination, the extension is cancelled before its blocks are moved. Leave a clear lane and step beside the machine rather than standing in front of it. A blocked powered piston can retry once the obstruction is removed.
Power, recovery, and limits
Piston bases themselves conduct, so check for unintended side connections. A connected piston contributes to a dynamo's load whether or not it is visibly moving. You do not need to pulse a piston continuously to keep it extended: an on lever holds the powered state.
Breaking an extended base removes its head. Breaking a head also removes the matching base and recovers the canonical base item in finite-resource play without making duplicate parts. A head is not a separate crafted tool. Orientation and extension are part of the saved device/world state.
The current piston is a block pusher, not a conveyor, fluid pump, remote inventory mover, or powered door controller. See troubleshooting if it stays retracted or fails to pull back.
Exact crafting patterns
One item per occupied grid slot. A dot is an empty slot. Outputs and ingredient counts below come from the current crafting definitions.