Thoughts On Minecarts

[Silvycakes]

Wanna hear y'all's thoughts on minecarts. What do you think of them now? How would you change them? I'll start by saying that turns for powered rails and detector rails would be amazing allowing them to be integrated way more seamlessly. I also like the idea of having all carryable blocks able to be placed in minecarts and having stuff like furnace minecart actually act like furnaces and have their old functionality be replaced (and ideally improved on) by trains.

[arlwiss]

one less known thing BTA does is it recreates the old bug with minecarts that allows for minecart boosters, similar to purposefully having the kind of boat physics that allow for all that fun stuff people did with boats in alpha. whatever overhaul happens to minecarts in the future to fix their collision jank, i really hope it keeps this secret booster behaviour somehow. even if that doesn't seem very likely since it comes from the jank

[who]

Minecarts are seldom used as minecarts on vanilla Minecraft in the first place because tracks are hard to lay down, and I think rails more than carts are at fault from that, things like wooden rails that don't need support for a set amount of blocks, or even some sort of fast rail placement (perhaps bent rails like Create's train tracks, but that's a lot of work to implement), minecarts that place rails, etc

Other than that perhaps some eye candy like spark particles when going too fast or coloured minecarts


Now for proper trains they have a different set of issues, I've played a lot with pretty much all Minecraft train mods and they all have one thing in common, the game just doesn't produce enough stuff for them to be useful on singleplayer, games like Factorio where resources only appear in scarce locations and are immensely dense can make good use of them, Minecraft just cannot do that unless you have many many items worth in a single block, lest you want an entire biome worth of resources (and something to justify spending them all which is unrealistic, not even high tech mc modpacks can get close) then just laying down the rail is going to be 100x the work than pretty much any other method of moving stuff home, or even moving home to the resource

[Lane107]

after trying to make an actual functional mine using minecarts to carry back resources by carrying chests into minecarts and having them good up to the surface into a storage area, i really hope they get "fixed" sooner rather than later. i don't need a full fledged re-implementation, but dealing with them is so unbearable. countless times my minecarts would only sometimes go all the way up, and even when they did they would only sometimes bounce back, or sometimes stack into each other and blast off as soon as they get touched. and you just need so many powered rails to make them go up all the way, it just isn't worth it. granted, i play on a server, so there's some extra jank there. but still. it's cool that they're faster though

[Timtams]

Minecarts are good solely if you want to make the player go from point A to B

Anything outside of that welcome to a world of pain. They have so many problems that it feels like it's never worth to do. For one, transportation. It's good to go from point A to B, but with a gigantic asterisk attached to that, as it's true IF you have a metric ton of iron and gold to make rails, as the amount you get for the resources you need to go more than like, 50 blocks is pretty agonizing, the cost sink is way too much personally. For second the physics are, terrible. I like the speed buff since it kinda makes them into speeding demons but also this implementation just makes them even worse, since they feel like they're on double speed constantly, going from 0 to 100 in a matter of frames, they drop like rocks and it makes them such jank ass to work with, it doesn't feel natural (Also extra note is that sometimes they're TOO fast so if you try to do any sort of timing it's a nightmare and i've had instances where they can straight up skip unpowered rails like ok). ESPECIALLY when more than 1 minecart is involved this is where shit truly hits the fan. The love to bounce of each other, making infinite speed, clipping into each other all the time (especially when it comes to unloaded chunks, if they get into an unloaded chunk it just conjoins them together into one conglomerate and then they perpetually speed each other, makes any actual long range transport that isn't just you impossible.) and it's rather unpleasant. And with all this it makes long range storage travel not really worth it, because as another guy earlier pointed out, there's almost never a need to actually need to transport so much constantly to be worth setting all of this up, 99/100 times it's better to just take one trip yourself and bring what you need than to deal with minecart chests and all their jank.

That's all that's frankly off the top of my head I'm pretty sure there's more but overall they have alot of potential uses but how their physics are really cripples any point in using them if it isn't a simple going back and fourth in one line, and even then it's a pretty big time sink.

[Silvycakes]

Yeah I feel like if they weren't as jank physics wise, rails weren't nearly as overpriced, and they had some kind of item input/output they'd be so much better.

I also wish they could go through unloaded chunks but it just doesn't seem possible without some kind of massive performance hit/exploit on servers.

[Timtams]

Yeah the chunk loading thing is def one of those "how do you really solve" things, but it's still enough of a point, esp with the speed increase funnily enough since it means if you wanna have like a conga line of mobs you wanna split apart at the end (Specific example but it's something ive done b4) you have to really space them apart so them hitting unloaded chunks happened to me a few times, which means yknow they super glued onto each other and from there it was over

[goblinreal]

I usually use minecarts to transport items from my mine to the surface. Being able to put chests in minecarts makes them especially useful because then I can load one chest into a minecart and hold the other chest, allowing me to take like 3x the amount of items up in one trip than if I had just filled my inventory. It would be even better if I had powered rails tho, since right now I have to push the minecart all the way up.

If they end up reworking the minecart physics, I hope they do it in such a way that you can make 'em do jumps in stuff. It would be super cool for building roller coasters and other fun stuff.

Overall I really like minecarts but there's definitely a lot of room for improvement

[Lane107]

I usually use minecarts to transport items from my mine to the surface. Being able to put chests in minecarts makes them especially useful because then I can load one chest into a minecart and hold the other chest, allowing me to take like 3x the amount of items up in one trip than if I had just filled my inventory. It would be even better if I had powered rails tho, since right now I have to push the minecart all the way up.

If they end up reworking the minecart physics, I hope they do it in such a way that you can make 'em do jumps in stuff. It would be super cool for building roller coasters and other fun stuff.

Overall I really like minecarts but there's definitely a lot of room for improvement

jumping minecarts off the edge would be so insanely awesome, im suprised it hasn't already happened in modern minecraft

[Timtams]

I usually use minecarts to transport items from my mine to the surface. Being able to put chests in minecarts makes them especially useful because then I can load one chest into a minecart and hold the other chest, allowing me to take like 3x the amount of items up in one trip than if I had just filled my inventory. It would be even better if I had powered rails tho, since right now I have to push the minecart all the way up.

If they end up reworking the minecart physics, I hope they do it in such a way that you can make 'em do jumps in stuff. It would be super cool for building roller coasters and other fun stuff.

Overall I really like minecarts but there's definitely a lot of room for improvement

jumping minecarts off the edge would be so insanely awesome, im suprised it hasn't already happened in modern minecraft

IKR, I know they actually did add it with that like, minecart experiment thing they did ages ago but it hasnt really evolved past that. Frankly that's a good point of inspiration I hope BTA minecarts go down that track (lol)

[goblinreal]

jumping minecarts off the edge would be so insanely awesome, im suprised it hasn't already happened in modern minecraft

I'm pretty sure there's an experimental version of modern that changes the minecart physics to allow for jumps, but it's been a while (I think almost over a year now?) and they still haven’t implemented it into a proper update


EDIT: ah someone else already mentioned it lol

[Phoebruary]

I love them in multiplayer because they give the feeling of development and infrastructure. I don't think I'd use them in singleplayer though, just because you don't have multiple people's bases to connect.

[goblinreal]

I love them in multiplayer because they give the feeling of development and infrastructure. I don't think I'd use them in singleplayer though, just because you don't have multiple people's bases to connect.

Minecarts and other forms of development/infrastructure really do help make a multiplayer world feel alive. I think infrastructure is one of the more underrated aspects of multiplayer worlds considering how important it is to the overall feel of the world.

[BreakfastMint]

I’d use them a lot more if rails were easier to make.
Maybe if you could craft them in batches of 64 instead of only 16 they’d be easier to use.
Powered rails should also be way cheaper.

[makerofbread]

I feel like they're really cool if done well. I also saw a video where a guy had a texture pack for diagonal rails which made them actually diagonal instead of the weird squiggles, I don't know if BTA can implement that but that would be really cool!

[CarbonIML]

I use a thousand block long railway when I go strip mining, so much faster than walking.