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Faster Minecarts are good, but they require more than speed to be great

Snapshot 24w33a has added the option to make Minecarts faster - great! However, even with this, they still aren’t as useful as they should be. Here are some of my proposals to further improve them:

  • Better Furnace Carts: Essentially turn them into locomotives for Carts. Make it possible to control speed, brake and move backwards or forward, and generally better to control for the player
  • Transportation & Chaining: Reward players for building railway infrastructure between builds by letting them chain together dozens of Chest Carts (and other Minecarts) in order to transport more items than with any other method of transportation.
  • Switch Rails: In order to build more complex & efficient railways, we need simple rails which can route Carts onto different tracks/paths, from something as simple as switching from track A to track B, to being able to diverge a single track into 3 different tracks, and vice versa.
  • Signaling & Pathing: To add to the Better Furnace Carts and Switch Rails, it should be possible to set a Minecart to go to a designated destination. Let’s say you start at Stop A, and ahead of you there’s 2 switches; one goes to Stop B and the other to Stop C. Set your Cart to go to Stop C, and it will skip the switch to Stop B and directly head to stop C. Allow us to add these destination points in a similar manner to banners and maps perhaps.


I feel changes like this would go a long way to make Minecarts not just ok, but an actually useful method of transportation.

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    Registered User commented
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    I think the last one could be difficult to add, but I really like all this ideas! :D

  • 2
    Registered User commented
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    "I think the last one could be difficult to add, but I really like all this ideas! :D"

    First of all thank you, and second of all, after a bit of thinking yeah, I agree. It’s essentially “smart routing”, which I can see why people would say it doesn’t feel vanilla or why it might be difficult to implement, though I do know a Plugin that implemented this well, but I'm not sure whether or not it would actually work in vanilla.

    Maybe instead it would be better to make it so that you can simply switch tracks by pressing W A S D on your keyboard. For instance, you’re starting at stop A, and there is a junction ahead of you; the left side goes to stop B and the right side goes to stop C. You want to go to stop C, so you simply press “D” (or whatever your keybind for going right is), and it switches you to that track.

    I can see this becoming an issue with larger railway systems however, where you could have several junctions after one another, essentially forcing you to play Where’s Wally with less than 2 seconds of reaction time between junctions, or worse.

    I suppose one way to mitigate this is my Better Furnace Carts idea, which would allow you to slow-down ahead of junctions, so perhaps it wouldn’t be that big a problem.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    I'm not sure how vanilla the furnace minecart controls could be, but I think that a way you could do it is maybe have the same kind of setup that the beacon UI has to control it, or you could make the furnace minecart stop on unpowered powered rails. Other than that, these ideas are very good! I wrote the feedback about the chain link minecarts so that's the feature I really want in the game, but these would be a great supplement to that. 

     

    edit: that was sent twice. I apologize for that

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    Registered User commented
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    This sounds like you want the minecarts to be have extremely lazy automatic features. I don't think that is in the sense of the tinkering nature of minecraft. The chaining of minecarts however sounds very useful, or if they make a chest minecart the player can ride at the same time, like the chest boat. That would allow for more reliable faster ticketing systems to program the destination in your rail system