Railways How to implement better rail based transportation options using a variety of different blocks, items and entities
I think this is a fairly unique idea. It is different from other railway ideas in that it only adds one new minecart and two new blocks. It also has various unique controlling features and simple, keyboard mechanics. If, however, it is redundant, sorry.
Introduction
Ah, once such a useful mechanic; lay down track and ride along. However, slowly but surely, the great railways of the past have been superseded by newly, arguably actually older, forms of transportation; the mounts. It all started with the Carrot on a Stick. Then came horses. And finally, there came donkeys; a mixture of minecart, furnace cart and chest cart making railways utterly useless; why waste time laying tracks and coal, when you could have a speedy running chest that requires no food and can go essentially anywhere a minecart can and more?
Mechanics
Essentially what I am proposing here is a more useful way of transportation. We need speed, simplicity and fun. So, here is what I propose.
To unlink minecarts, just Shift-Rick click the two carts again. This will drop the lead.
Minecarts
The maximum speed will be increased to 32 blocks a second. This is to facilitate a stronger furnace minecart.
Minecarts also have a brake feature. To brake, press space. This will slow the minecart down however not any other carts unless one is in Furnace Cart Mode. Braking is a toggle however, one minecart may not be enough to break an entire train.
Mobs also no longer can travel on plain, metal minecarts.
Wooden Minecart
Wooden minecarts are minecarts crafted with wood with the two bottom corners iron ingots. Wooden carts travel at half the speed of iron carts. However, wooden minecarts are more useful for goods. Mobs can travel in them if empty.
Another feature of a wooden minecart is the ability to load ores and various materials into them using a hopper. A single minecart can take 5 stacks of coal, redstone dust, gravel, sand, dirt or clay. There are three levels; each corresponds to around 1.5 stacks.
This means, wooden minecarts are useful for mines, farms, quarries etc. You can also manually load these carts using right click as players cannot ride in them.
Furnace Minecart
These carts will become much stronger. They can now pull three full minecarts up 1:1 slopes. However, they would require tending to as it uses up one coal item per minute or one coal block per 10 minutes. Gradually, the furnace minecart will build up power, shown by increasingly dense smoke particles.
Multiple furnace minecarts can be coupled together to provide more power.
To get into furnace cart mode, simply right click the furnace cart without any fuel. Your GUI will change to reflect the speed. The exp bar will become the speed bar and the hearts the fuel. You can brake the cart using space in this mode. This mode would be useful to check how much fuel the cart has and the speed it is going. You can also toggle the direction. W would be used to tell the cart to go forwards, S would be to go backwards. Default is forwards.
Furnace carts do not require anyone to man and thus can runaway.
Chest Minecart
The inventory of these minecarts are reduced to 16 stacks. It is advised to use wooden minecarts for ores and things since they can store ore at a cheaper price.
Turnouts
These point blocks are essentially all a railway needs to function. There are 4 directions, bottom to left, top to left, bottom to right and top to right. These are chosen by facing where you want the diverging track to go and right clicking.
They are crafted like so.
Turnouts are controlled using redstone. They will toggle between going on the diverging rails or the stock rails. If a minecart happens to find a facing point, it will act like a normal straight rail no matter the state of the point.
Crossover
A crossover is formed when one placed rails in a cross fashion; the middle rail become a crossover. This rail permits travel in both directions to directly opposite blocks but not from one rail to another.
Shunting
One can now shunt minecarts around using a furnace minecart and a plain minecart coupled together. Shunting is performed by essentially pushing minecarts around. Minecarts see other minecarts as obstacles which can be moved. Thus, you can push loaded coal minecarts into a siding to be emptied.
Details
All in all, this should not be terribly hard to implement since it really is just adding a few new rail blocks and a horse style GUI. It uses two extra block IDs, the turnout which will have multiple metadata for direction and powered state and the crossover.
There is one extra item also, the wooden minecart.
Minecarts would store four extra variables; speed, time unloaded, fuel and direction. The game will calculate how far the minecart should have gone when you return to the chunk. That way, minecarts in unloaded chunks will continue to move.
I support this idea.
However: Why would I use wooden mine carts if they're slower, hold less, and only hold one type of item than chest minecarts?
They're not much cheaper; just a difference of 3 ingots.
Wow, support! The only thing I disagree with is (like with the others) the wooden minecart. The things I would change are the turnouts and the crossovers; The turnouts could simply be toggled with a right click, having 5 states: the ones you mentioned and the crossover. It can also be toggled with redstone (each pulse would make it go to the next state). The crossovers have the potential to be buggy, otherwise.
You could also add that the direction you are facing determines the direction a rail goes, and only if you place a rail against the side of another rail does the other rail form a corner.
As others have said, the Wooden Cart is a bit silly. It holds less than a regular Storage Cart, can't hold as many item types, is slower, and takes the ability to hold mobs from regular carts. All in all it is less useful and makes the regular cart less useful by stealing a use from it.
The rest I like.
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Maybe I will make the woodeart pure wood; just crafting in the top two rows in the table instead of the bottom to avoid clashes. The main reason I wanted a wooden cart was provide some more diversity and frankly, having an extra colour does make a lot of difference.
Maybe I will make the woodeart pure wood; just crafting in the top two rows in the table instead of the bottom to avoid clashes. The main reason I wanted a wooden cart was provide some more diversity and frankly, having an extra colour does make a lot of difference.
If you are going to have one for the sake of diversity I would just allow Minecarts to be dyed. It gives you the diversity and allows you to identify carts easily.
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Dyeing steel is... odd yo say the least. Dyeing wood is far morelogical.
Yes, I've seen Dinnerbone attempting to implement colored wood planks, however it was unimplemented. Dyeing wood makes sense. Anyone can paint a wooden wall with paint - paint a wooden cart with paint.
Maybe make Wooden-carts for mob/player-transportation and iron-carts made for the block-combinations like furnace-carts only? It makes sense since the iron-carts would obviously be the more sturdy of the two, thus being able to hold a furnace without breaking or catching fire. And being able to color the wooden carts would also help setting some differences between them. Now this looks like an even MORE interesting idea!
I do like the idea better if Wooden Carts are restricted to just moving players and mobs and the other car is for cart combinations like Chest Minecarts or Furnace Minecarts. But I still find them rather redundant, and would rather see metal carts dyed and wooden carts removed.
I admit it doesn't make very much sense to dye a metal cart but I would argue that it makes enough sense to work in the game and gives an added bonus of being able to label any kind of Minecart. With how it currently sounds like it would be implemented you can use dye to color player carts but it would be useful to identify a certain Minecart with Chest as your cart for carrying Ore, or to color code all carts by what rails they travel on.
For example you could have a rail station with 16 different tracks. If one set goes to an underwater base you dye all the carts on that track to be blue. Another set of tracks goes to a Village so you label that by dyeing the carts to be red. You have ones that go to your mine that are black, and then you have an internal supply system that refills all Furnace carts that is dyed yellow so people know not to mess with them.
Plus, seeing how you can link carts with this idea it would make for some damn fine looking trains.
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How to implement better rail based transportation options using a variety of different blocks, items and entities
I think this is a fairly unique idea. It is different from other railway ideas in that it only adds one new minecart and two new blocks. It also has various unique controlling features and simple, keyboard mechanics. If, however, it is redundant, sorry.
Introduction
Mechanics
Linking
Please read this thread; note only the minecart linking aspect is part of this idea.
http://www.minecraft.../topic/1801164-
To unlink minecarts, just Shift-Rick click the two carts again. This will drop the lead.
Minecarts
The maximum speed will be increased to 32 blocks a second. This is to facilitate a stronger furnace minecart.
Minecarts also have a brake feature. To brake, press space. This will slow the minecart down however not any other carts unless one is in Furnace Cart Mode. Braking is a toggle however, one minecart may not be enough to break an entire train.
Mobs also no longer can travel on plain, metal minecarts.
Wooden Minecart
Wooden minecarts are minecarts crafted with wood with the two bottom corners iron ingots. Wooden carts travel at half the speed of iron carts. However, wooden minecarts are more useful for goods. Mobs can travel in them if empty.
Another feature of a wooden minecart is the ability to load ores and various materials into them using a hopper. A single minecart can take 5 stacks of coal, redstone dust, gravel, sand, dirt or clay. There are three levels; each corresponds to around 1.5 stacks.
This means, wooden minecarts are useful for mines, farms, quarries etc. You can also manually load these carts using right click as players cannot ride in them.
Furnace Minecart
These carts will become much stronger. They can now pull three full minecarts up 1:1 slopes. However, they would require tending to as it uses up one coal item per minute or one coal block per 10 minutes. Gradually, the furnace minecart will build up power, shown by increasingly dense smoke particles.
Multiple furnace minecarts can be coupled together to provide more power.
To get into furnace cart mode, simply right click the furnace cart without any fuel. Your GUI will change to reflect the speed. The exp bar will become the speed bar and the hearts the fuel. You can brake the cart using space in this mode. This mode would be useful to check how much fuel the cart has and the speed it is going. You can also toggle the direction. W would be used to tell the cart to go forwards, S would be to go backwards. Default is forwards.
Furnace carts do not require anyone to man and thus can runaway.
Chest Minecart
The inventory of these minecarts are reduced to 16 stacks. It is advised to use wooden minecarts for ores and things since they can store ore at a cheaper price.
Turnouts
These point blocks are essentially all a railway needs to function. There are 4 directions, bottom to left, top to left, bottom to right and top to right. These are chosen by facing where you want the diverging track to go and right clicking.
They are crafted like so.
Turnouts are controlled using redstone. They will toggle between going on the diverging rails or the stock rails. If a minecart happens to find a facing point, it will act like a normal straight rail no matter the state of the point.
Crossover
A crossover is formed when one placed rails in a cross fashion; the middle rail become a crossover. This rail permits travel in both directions to directly opposite blocks but not from one rail to another.
Shunting
One can now shunt minecarts around using a furnace minecart and a plain minecart coupled together. Shunting is performed by essentially pushing minecarts around. Minecarts see other minecarts as obstacles which can be moved. Thus, you can push loaded coal minecarts into a siding to be emptied.
There is one extra item also, the wooden minecart.
However: Why would I use wooden mine carts if they're slower, hold less, and only hold one type of item than chest minecarts?
They're not much cheaper; just a difference of 3 ingots.
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Good idea! I would love to see it implemented.
You could also add that the direction you are facing determines the direction a rail goes, and only if you place a rail against the side of another rail does the other rail form a corner.
The rest I like.
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If you are going to have one for the sake of diversity I would just allow Minecarts to be dyed. It gives you the diversity and allows you to identify carts easily.
Want some advice on how to thrive in the Suggestions section? Check this handy list of guidelines and tips for posting your ideas and responding to the ideas of others!
http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-discussion/suggestions/2775557-guidelines-for-the-suggestions-forum
Support.
Yes, I've seen Dinnerbone attempting to implement colored wood planks, however it was unimplemented. Dyeing wood makes sense. Anyone can paint a wooden wall with paint - paint a wooden cart with paint.
I don't have access to a proper computer right now so I cannot update anything though...
I admit it doesn't make very much sense to dye a metal cart but I would argue that it makes enough sense to work in the game and gives an added bonus of being able to label any kind of Minecart. With how it currently sounds like it would be implemented you can use dye to color player carts but it would be useful to identify a certain Minecart with Chest as your cart for carrying Ore, or to color code all carts by what rails they travel on.
For example you could have a rail station with 16 different tracks. If one set goes to an underwater base you dye all the carts on that track to be blue. Another set of tracks goes to a Village so you label that by dyeing the carts to be red. You have ones that go to your mine that are black, and then you have an internal supply system that refills all Furnace carts that is dyed yellow so people know not to mess with them.
Plus, seeing how you can link carts with this idea it would make for some damn fine looking trains.
Want some advice on how to thrive in the Suggestions section? Check this handy list of guidelines and tips for posting your ideas and responding to the ideas of others!
http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-discussion/suggestions/2775557-guidelines-for-the-suggestions-forum