When a player rings a bell, it swings away from the face that was clicked: the ring direction is the interaction direction. When redstone rings a bell, it always swings in the bell's own FACING direction, no matter which side the power arrived from.
The cause is visible in BellBlock (Mojang mappings, 26.1.2 and 26.2): neighborChanged calls attemptToRing(level, pos, null), and the null direction falls back to state.getValue(FACING). The information needed to do better is already in scope: neighborChanged receives the redstone Orientation of the incoming update and discards it.
This affects every attachment. A ceiling-hung bell accepts player rings from all four directions and swings accordingly, but redstone always produces the same single swing (its hidden FACING value), so three of its four swing directions are unreachable by redstone entirely. For wall-mounted bells this is worse than an inconsistency: their FACING points into the wall axis, which isProperHit rejects for player interaction (wall bells only swing along the wall). So redstone currently animates wall bells in a direction the game itself considers impossible.
Steps to reproduce:
Place a floor bell.
Ring it by hand from each of its two swingable sides (the two sides on its facing axis; the other two sides are the frame posts and do not ring directionally): it swings away from the clicked face, giving two different swing directions.
Power it with redstone from each of its four sides (a lever on an adjacent block works): it swings in the same single direction every time, regardless of where the power came from.
Repeat with a bell hung under a block: players can ring it in all four directions, redstone still always swings it the same single way.
What I expected:
A redstone-rung bell swings according to the direction the power came from, matching how player interaction picks the swing direction.
A note on the fix shape (verified):
Derive the swing direction from the side the power arrives on, gated by the same isProperHit validity player interaction uses, and fall back to a valid direction for the attachment (not raw FACING) when the power comes from a side the bell cannot swing toward, so ringing stays direction-agnostic and no existing contraption goes silent. Implemented as a toggleable mod and compared against unmodified behavior in the same session: with the fix, powering a wall bell from its two valid sides produces the two matching swings; with vanilla behavior every side produces the same single swing.
Linked issues
duplicates 1
Comments 2
Thank you for the review - I believe the report was read as a suggestion because of my closing note about a fix, which I should have left out. The core of the report is a defect in existing behavior:
Wall-mounted bells, when rung by redstone, swing along their FACING axis - the axis pointing into the wall. That is a direction the game itself rejects as invalid for ringing: BellBlock.isProperHit refuses it for player interaction, which is why no player action can ever make a wall bell swing that way. Redstone-triggered rings bypass that validity check (attemptToRing receives a null direction and falls back to raw FACING), so redstone animates a swing state the game otherwise defines as impossible.
Steps to reproduce:
Place a bell on a wall.
Ring it by hand: it swings along the wall, in either of the two valid directions.
Power it with redstone: it swings into the wall axis instead - a swing no player interaction can produce.
Observed: redstone rings ignore the validity rule that player rings are checked against. This is an internal inconsistency in current behavior, not a proposed feature.
Thank you for your report!
After consideration, the issue is being closed as Invalid.
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