Uncle Jeff’s Smart Pressure Plates: Redstone Revolution for Minecraft 1.7.10
If you have ever built an elaborate mob grinder only to watch creepers waltz through your skeleton-only trap, or if you are tired of fumbling with buttons and levers just to open an iron door, Uncle Jeff’s Smart Pressure Plates is the mod you never knew you needed. This clever addition to Minecraft 1.7.10 replaces guesswork with precision, giving you five new pressure plates that can tell the difference between a harmless villager and a hissing creeper. Suddenly, your redstone contraptions become intelligent sorting systems, secure entryways, and automated farms that react to exactly the right kind of entity.
How Smart Pressure Plates Work
Unlike vanilla pressure plates that simply detect any entity standing on them, Uncle Jeff’s plates read the type of living creature and output a redstone signal based on a predefined strength table. If multiple valid mobs are on the same plate, the strongest signal among them wins. This means you can design a door that opens only for players, or a trap that triggers exclusively when a zombie steps on it. The mod adds five distinct plates, each tuned to a specific category of mobs, along with a custom achievement that rewards your first successful craft.
The Five Detector Plates
Each plate is crafted with a unique “key ingredient” that defines its detection group. Here is what every plate recognizes and the redstone signal strength it outputs:
Person Detector
Built with a hay bale, this plate responds to non-hostile humanoids. It outputs a strong signal of 15 for players, making it perfect for secure iron doors that only you can sprint through. Villagers trigger a weak signal of 2, and zombie pigmen give just 1. No more accidentally letting a horde of pigmen into your base.
Livestock Detector
Using a clay block as the key ingredient, this plate is tuned for animals raised for meat or materials. Chickens output 1, pigs 2, cows 3, sheep 4, rabbits 5, squid 6, and mooshrooms a solid 7. It is an elegant way to sort your farm animals into separate pens or activate a breeding system only when the right creature walks by.
Non-Farm Animal Detector
Crafted with a brick block, this plate senses passive mobs that are not typically farmed. Bats give a signal of 1, horses 2, wolves and dogs 3, and ocelots or cats 4. If you want to build a stable that only opens for your trusty horse, this is the plate to use.
Monster Detector
The mossy cobblestone-based plate is your go-to for overworld hostile mobs. Slimes and magma cubes output 1, zombies 2, skeletons and wither skeletons 3, spiders 4, creepers 5, silverfish 6, witches 7, killer rabbits 8, and endermen a powerful 9. This plate turns any grinder into a selective sorting machine, ensuring only the mobs you want get pushed into the collection chamber.
Demon Detector
For Nether fortresses and blaze farms, the quartz block plate detects nether mobs. Magma cubes output 1, ghasts 2, regular skeletons 3, wither skeletons 4, and blazes 5. It is a must-have for anyone building an automated wither skeleton farm or a blaze-powered generator.
Installation and Crafting
All five plates follow a simple 2x2 crafting pattern: two redstone dust placed below two of the key ingredient blocks. The recipes are shapeless, so you can arrange them in any order as long as the redstone sits beneath the defining material. If you want to skip the manual file management, the foxygame.net launcher provides a modern and flexible way to install Uncle Jeff’s Smart Pressure Plates directly from its menu, making it easy to keep your mods organized without digging through folders. Once installed, the plates behave like any other pressure plate but with the added intelligence of mob-specific detection.
The “Repopulation” Achievement
The mod includes a single achievement that unlocks the first time you craft any of the five plates, provided you have already earned the prerequisite “Repopulation” achievement from vanilla Minecraft (breeding two cows with wheat). A small quirk: the achievement only triggers if you craft exactly one plate using a simple drag-and-drop method. Shift-clicking to craft multiple plates at once will not fire the achievement, so take your time with that first recipe.
Practical Uses and Tips
These plates open up a world of redstone possibilities. You can build a player-only iron door that stays shut for zombies, a livestock sorter that separates chickens from cows based on signal strength, or a creeper-proof skeleton trap. Because the output is the strongest signal among detected mobs, you can use comparators to fine-tune which mobs trigger a mechanism. For example, a monster detector plate connected to a comparator set to subtract signal strength 4 will ignore slimes, zombies, and skeletons, activating only when a spider or stronger mob steps on it.
Keep in mind that mossy cobblestone, the key ingredient for the monster detector, is scarce before Minecraft version 1.8. If you are playing on an older world, you might need to raid dungeons or jungle temples to find it. The mod author has hinted that the recipe could change to mossy stone bricks in a future update if that block becomes more accessible.
What’s Coming Next
Uncle Jeff has teased two exciting additions for future versions. An owner plate will respond exclusively to the player who crafted it, adding a layer of personal security that no other mob can bypass. A minecart-chest weighted plate will measure the contents of a storage minecart and output a signal proportional to the total items inside, acting like a heavy weighted pressure plate for rail systems. These features promise even deeper automation for your Minecraft worlds.
Conclusion
Uncle Jeff’s Smart Pressure Plates transforms redstone from a blunt instrument into a scalpel. Whether you are a seasoned engineer or a casual builder, the ability to distinguish between a player, a pig, and a creeper with a single block is a game-changer. The mod is lightweight, server-friendly, and fits seamlessly into Minecraft 1.7.10 with Forge. If you encounter any bugs or have ideas for improvement, the mod author welcomes feedback on CurseForge. Give your contraptions the intelligence they deserve and never let a creeper ruin your skeleton trap again.