Minecraft – How to make the player face different directions

You can set a block to repeater via this command:

/setblock ~ ~ ~ minecraft:unpowered_repeater  

That places a repeater facing north, with a one tick delay. If you want to create a different repeater you have to calculate a datavalue, with this formula:

datavalue = direction + (4 * delay)

Where the delay goes from 0 to 3, and the direction goes like this:

• 0: North
• 1: East
• 2: South
• 3: West

For example, if you want to create a repeater facing east with the least amount of delay you calculate:

datavalue = 1 + (4 * 0) = 1

To then create that repeater execute this command:

/setblock ~ ~ ~ minecraft:unpowered_repeater 1

No. In vanilla Minecraft on a vanilla server, snowballs and other throwables do not hit players.

It's simply occam's razor; if snowballs didn't hit the player in alpha 1.0.5, and don't hit the player in release 1.8.4 (and also all versions after release 1.4.4, as confirmed in MC-3179), and there is no indication in any changelog that the behavior changed, let alone changed twice in between those versions, it stands to reason that such a change did not occur.

There are some server plug-ins that change this behavior, though. Snowball Damage is a Bukkit plugin that does precisely what it says on the tin. Similar plugins with similar functionalities exist. This is likely where the confusion comes. Many, many servers use Bukkit (in 2012, 80% of servers were running Bukkit. More current statistics are unavailable), so many users may have been exposed to such plugins, and are remembering behavior that does not exist in vanilla.