The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Join Date:
6/29/2017
Posts:
49
Member Details
Hello Minecraft Community
First of all, I guess this has been discussed before and I don't want to create a uproar or have Jeb remove the Furnace Minecart like he once mentioned.
The way I see the Furnace Minecart is that it was a feature that was once added a long time ago, more or less "quickly thrown together" and never really touched upon again.
Nothing wrong with doing that, sometimes you have to implement stuff that way before adding details.
First of all, I don't see the Furnace Minecart as something bad, it shouldn't be removed, it just needs a bit of updating and polishing, and then it'll be fine again.
know that some people will say that Gold Rails replaced it and as such it's useless(and I guess that's also how Jeb sees it) however, Gold Rails are something that's something expensive and I'd say it's something you use for your "Home Minecart" only.
The Furnace Minecart allows you(at the cost of coal) to stay mobile on unpowered rails as well, of course, since Rails cost iron you most likely won't place a lot of them and use the Mineshaft ones but they would still have use. It would also work lovely as a train and for a few other things, like for example this:
It may seem a bit silly, but what if you went underground and found a Mineshaft nearby your familiar secured caves.
You go down and mine further and after a while it's time to head back up.
Now, what if you could simply use the rails in the mineshaft, complete the track by using some spare rails from other mineshaft sectors, use some chest minecarts, a normal one for you to sit in as well as a powered one to go back to your familiar mines and transport stuff that way?
If you've done long mining tours then I'm sure that you've set up a base down there as well and have a few chests full of content ready to be transported up. Wouldn't it be kinda lovely to make mineshafts useful like that?
Would give Mineshafts a bit more of a use than just being special structures so to say, and you don't have to use it if you don't want to, you can just play MC fine just like you did before.
So, what do I want to change?
The Minecarts could be updated in general, I don't think that players would mind a revamp as long as they still allow for the same speed and have similar physics.
This is something that could actually be redesigned where a lot of people wouldn't mind, unlike the combat update/swordnerf/texture change.
-
However, there's mainly three things that I'd want to have adjusted:
-For one, fix how they rotate around when going around corners, they quickly face the other way before being rotated again.
This is most likely a bug, all Minecarts currently have a bug when going uphill, as soon as they reach the highest block they do rotate 90 degrees to the side(and also rotate 180 degrees when going off track).
-Second, changing the way how they do corners. Currently you can link minecarts to a powered minecart and have it pull 4 or 5 minecarts that way, however once a powered minecart goes around a corner(unless it's linked to another powered one) it will push the others back and unlink from them.
This most likely happens due to the Powered Minecart doing corners differently, it also slows down after doing a corner, requiring you to click on it again(doesn't need new fuel)
-Third, changing the way the Minecart behaves when powered, currently it moves towards the player, meaning that if you sit in a minecart right behind it and then activate it, it'll move backwards and not forwards like one would expect.
So with the change: Powered Minecarts would corner correctly, they also don't unlink from other linked minecarts and don't slow down after doing corners. The minecart always moves "away" from the player direction when powered.
That's all, as you can see those are minor changes and I hope that most people can understand this.
Now...
Since Minecarts are outdated a bit in general, there could be further changes or a "Minecart Update" so to say.
Really through, it feels like, minus the addition of new ones, Minecarts haven't been touched again ever since, heck, while checking the Texture I realized that the dirt layer(from alpha) is still in it.
So here's a few further ideas, voting for this idea doesn't mean automatically voting for this, those are optional things and you can mention what you think of them in the comments:
-Make Minecarts placeable on any kind of block as well as placeable by player position(when the player places them down they'll always face towards the player)
-Give minecarts a full texture, so that all sides have a texture and not just use the same part(you'll see what I mean if you see the texture file, they currently only have one for all 4 sides)
-Maybe add a different texture per Minecart Type(although I guess this might be possible via Resource Packs yet), something like:
Black for Furnace, Dark Grey for Hopper, Grey for Player, Red for TNT, Brown for Chest.
-GUI for Furnace Minecart
--Have a Field where you enter Coal to fuel it and make it save power if not in use, similar to how the Brewing Stand uses Blaze Rods and keeps the "power".
--Allow to manually stop/toggle directions of it, 3 buttons, maybe something like < o >, arrows for forwards and backwards and o for stop.
--Maybe also allow to set which direction will be forwards, so if you want the minecart to drive towards you, you can set that.
-Maybe add some kind of Rail stopper block, basically a small rod extending out from it, if powered by any redstone mechanic(like a button) the rod will go down and allow Minecarts to pass.
-Properly make the Ignited Furnace Texture Toggleable via NBT Tags. I read that even if you set the Fuel value to 0, the Powered Minecart will still show the ignited Furance Texture for 3 minutes.
So, what does the community think of this?
Keep in mind, you don't have to use the Furnace Minecart, this is simply to make it more useful(even if most of those are bugfixes) for the players that plan to use it, you can continue playing Minecraft fine just like before and this won't change anything to this.
Edit:
Some other changes to the Minecarts: Minecarts curently do a 90° turn after reaching the top of a slope, this would be removed with this, making them move properly.
TNT Minecart now only explodes when going over a activator rail.
This one can be discussed, however, currently TNT Minecarts work the following way:
If going over a activator rail they'll be activated, going over another deactivates them(them falling down a long distance and not landing on rails does as well, which could be removed I guess, if you set it off it's supposed to explode).
If done that way they'll explode with the power based on the speed they had when going over the activator rail, they won't destroy rails.
-
Alternatively, if it slams into something at high speed it explodes just like regular TNT, removing rails and without the power based on speed factor, making it inconsistent, this won't bother me but there's a few issues:
This works for Entities and Blocks, the issue is that while going around corners the Cart might randomly blow up, also when placed near other carts and a player moving near it, the cart might get pushed into the other cart "glitches" and glitches out of it, exploding, had that happen on my server by accident, quite a mess...
Alternatively, if Mojang can fix it so it only really explodes when it should, then I'll gladly take that, but think we can simply have it blow up when going over a activator Rail.
Edit2: Rails Placed on player orientation/rotation
Basically instead of "autoconnecting"(outside of doing corners) minecart rails are now placed based on player rotation, meaning that it's possible to have two tracks next to eachother without issues.
I like this. I would love to see minecarts become more useful in general. Currently it's a huge pain to lay large minecart tracls due to the massive cost in Iron and Gold. I think in addition to this they should change the crafting recipe for rails from iron ingots to iron nuggets, so we can make more of them more easily. Currently horses, boats and elytra are far better ways to get around quickly.
I like this. I would love to see minecarts become more useful in general. Currently it's a huge pain to lay large minecart tracls due to the massive cost in Iron and Gold. I think in addition to this they should change the crafting recipe for rails from iron ingots to iron nuggets, so we can make more of them more easily. Currently horses, boats and elytra are far better ways to get around quickly.
Thanks for reading this(and lovely Spider Avatar).
True, it's still a pain, although I did think that the crafting recipe was changed to give more rails?
Not to talk about a different game, but Terraria does have Minecart Tracks since a while as well and there it works, first thought it's because Iron's more common there(not as common as Coal in MC but still common), however looks like I remembered wrong and using one iron bar(3 ore) and 1 wood, they produce 30, now buffed up to 50 Rails.
-
I was thinking if MC's should be maybe doubled to 32, shouldn't really cause balance issues, no?
And you do use up 6 iron for this which is quite a large amount, makes me wonder if they should give a stack but that's a bit overkill I guess.
Hmm, the other rails are 6, can't see it in the Changelog but were they 6 at one point in time before being changed to 16?
Think we can increase those up to 8, if not 16 as well, but 16 might be a little too much.
Iron Ingots is a good idea, since those exist now, bars are kinda much for rails anyways, didn't get to fully read your comment(and have this window open for about 10 hours I guess) before due to being interrupted and busy with other things today, so I didn't see that part until now. I was wondering if the crafting recipe should be changed to 4 iron and 2 sticks, but ingots allow us to keep the original recipe which is what I'd prefer.
So changing iron/gold bars to their ingot forms would already be a quick and easy change that would help, together with updating the Minecarts.
Regarding other means of transport, I really want to avoid my horse getting damaged or falling in battle so to say, although they are a good feature and I do like them as well as donkeys and mules(but can we please just have a way to get the chests off of them?) also since they have different stats they aren't that easily "replaceable".
Boats are good, but require water, also luckily no longer break which helps a lot.
Elytra are rare and with only a limited amount of them, I wouldn't feel confortable in using them other for some fun flights from mountains(but they only seem to really work well in special worlds or when having Fireworks ready) or having keepinventory=True, as I really wouldn't want to lose them, also want mending on them so I never get to the point where I'm unable to fix them(makes one wonder if the Anvil Mechanics are ok like that)
But I do get what you mean, and yeah, Minecarts(in a game about Mining) do definitely deserve an update.
Railways are NOT expensive at all; I mine an average about 200 iron ore per hour of caving - enough to make 533 rails - and about 24 gold ore - enough for 24 powered rails - and with a spacing of 1 powered rail for every 32 regular rails that is enough for 792 blocks of track - making iron the limiting resource (never mind that i do not even make regular rails because of the amounts i find in mineshafts - more than 1,000 in a single play session on a couple occasions! All the gold I've taken from minecarts in mineshafts has also more than offset the gold I used).
In my first world I have around 15,000 blocks of railways connecting all of my bases - while I could make a railway more than 1.3 million blocks long with all the iron, gold, and rails that I've collected - the amount of gold I've collected is about 100 times higher than what I've used for powered rails - I even have 538 more gold stored in blocks than the ore I've mined can account for (some of which was also lost; once I craft resources into blocks I do not uncraft them again, I keep a stack of gold ingots on hand for making more powered rails as needed):
I recently collected all of this stuff from 9 separate mineshafts and associated caves and ravines - more than 16000 resources and loot, including 2739 rails (stored as 304 "rail blocks", a mod block I made that compacts 9 rails into one block, plus 3 rails), 2772 iron (308 blocks), and 396 gold (44 blocks) - altogether enough to make a railway 10527 blocks long with one powered rail every 26.6 blocks (i.e. closer together than I place them, except at the ends):
Seriously, the game is called "Minecraft" - and you clearly do not need to have my playstyle (100:1 ratio of resources collected/used) to get plenty of resources (I've even seen people make an iron farm just to get "on a rail"! A basic iron farm only yields around 40 iron per hour, so they are really willing to spend the time to build one and wait 9-10 hours over a couple hours of mining? Gold is also relatively more common than what I've found if you stay below y=32, where it is 1/5 as common as iron - or above y=32 in a mesa biome, where it is more concentrated than iron is).
ETA: since 1.8 a single chunk has had an average of more than 100 iron and about 10 gold (more than in 1.6.4, the version I still play in, and in fact I've found that I can collect ores even faster; the simpler, if much less interesting, caves also help. This does not include mesas, which have as much additional gold as iron and 10% more veins of gold overall).
The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Join Date:
6/29/2017
Posts:
49
Member Details
You might want to use the iron and gold for something else, or store it up later for Beacons, besides, the point is that most of the playerbase won't spend that much iron on rails, if you feel like doing it, then fine, but others might not and they are somewhat pricy, don't see anything wrong with changing the recipe to ingots.
Also Iron Farms are renewable where mining iron isn't.
There's also multiplayer to take into account where you don't have the entire world for yourself and can't just hog all resources.
Hello Minecraft Community
First of all, I guess this has been discussed before and I don't want to create a uproar or have Jeb remove the Furnace Minecart like he once mentioned.
The way I see the Furnace Minecart is that it was a feature that was once added a long time ago, more or less "quickly thrown together" and never really touched upon again.
Nothing wrong with doing that, sometimes you have to implement stuff that way before adding details.
First of all, I don't see the Furnace Minecart as something bad, it shouldn't be removed, it just needs a bit of updating and polishing, and then it'll be fine again.
The Furnace Minecart allows you(at the cost of coal) to stay mobile on unpowered rails as well, of course, since Rails cost iron you most likely won't place a lot of them and use the Mineshaft ones but they would still have use. It would also work lovely as a train and for a few other things, like for example this:
It may seem a bit silly, but what if you went underground and found a Mineshaft nearby your familiar secured caves.
You go down and mine further and after a while it's time to head back up.
Now, what if you could simply use the rails in the mineshaft, complete the track by using some spare rails from other mineshaft sectors, use some chest minecarts, a normal one for you to sit in as well as a powered one to go back to your familiar mines and transport stuff that way?
If you've done long mining tours then I'm sure that you've set up a base down there as well and have a few chests full of content ready to be transported up. Wouldn't it be kinda lovely to make mineshafts useful like that?
Would give Mineshafts a bit more of a use than just being special structures so to say, and you don't have to use it if you don't want to, you can just play MC fine just like you did before.
So, what do I want to change?
The Minecarts could be updated in general, I don't think that players would mind a revamp as long as they still allow for the same speed and have similar physics.
This is something that could actually be redesigned where a lot of people wouldn't mind, unlike the combat update/swordnerf/texture change.
-
However, there's mainly three things that I'd want to have adjusted:
-For one, fix how they rotate around when going around corners, they quickly face the other way before being rotated again.
This is most likely a bug, all Minecarts currently have a bug when going uphill, as soon as they reach the highest block they do rotate 90 degrees to the side(and also rotate 180 degrees when going off track).
-Second, changing the way how they do corners. Currently you can link minecarts to a powered minecart and have it pull 4 or 5 minecarts that way, however once a powered minecart goes around a corner(unless it's linked to another powered one) it will push the others back and unlink from them.
This most likely happens due to the Powered Minecart doing corners differently, it also slows down after doing a corner, requiring you to click on it again(doesn't need new fuel)
-Third, changing the way the Minecart behaves when powered, currently it moves towards the player, meaning that if you sit in a minecart right behind it and then activate it, it'll move backwards and not forwards like one would expect.
So with the change:
Powered Minecarts would corner correctly, they also don't unlink from other linked minecarts and don't slow down after doing corners. The minecart always moves "away" from the player direction when powered.
That's all, as you can see those are minor changes and I hope that most people can understand this.
Now...
Since Minecarts are outdated a bit in general, there could be further changes or a "Minecart Update" so to say.
Really through, it feels like, minus the addition of new ones, Minecarts haven't been touched again ever since, heck, while checking the Texture I realized that the dirt layer(from alpha) is still in it.
So here's a few further ideas, voting for this idea doesn't mean automatically voting for this, those are optional things and you can mention what you think of them in the comments:
-Give minecarts a full texture, so that all sides have a texture and not just use the same part(you'll see what I mean if you see the texture file, they currently only have one for all 4 sides)
-Maybe add a different texture per Minecart Type(although I guess this might be possible via Resource Packs yet), something like:
Black for Furnace, Dark Grey for Hopper, Grey for Player, Red for TNT, Brown for Chest.
-GUI for Furnace Minecart
--Have a Field where you enter Coal to fuel it and make it save power if not in use, similar to how the Brewing Stand uses Blaze Rods and keeps the "power".
--Allow to manually stop/toggle directions of it, 3 buttons, maybe something like < o >, arrows for forwards and backwards and o for stop.
--Maybe also allow to set which direction will be forwards, so if you want the minecart to drive towards you, you can set that.
-Maybe add some kind of Rail stopper block, basically a small rod extending out from it, if powered by any redstone mechanic(like a button) the rod will go down and allow Minecarts to pass.
-Properly make the Ignited Furnace Texture Toggleable via NBT Tags. I read that even if you set the Fuel value to 0, the Powered Minecart will still show the ignited Furance Texture for 3 minutes.
So, what does the community think of this?
Keep in mind, you don't have to use the Furnace Minecart, this is simply to make it more useful(even if most of those are bugfixes) for the players that plan to use it, you can continue playing Minecraft fine just like before and this won't change anything to this.
Edit:
Some other changes to the Minecarts:
Minecarts curently do a 90° turn after reaching the top of a slope, this would be removed with this, making them move properly.
TNT Minecart now only explodes when going over a activator rail.
This one can be discussed, however, currently TNT Minecarts work the following way:
If going over a activator rail they'll be activated, going over another deactivates them(them falling down a long distance and not landing on rails does as well, which could be removed I guess, if you set it off it's supposed to explode).
If done that way they'll explode with the power based on the speed they had when going over the activator rail, they won't destroy rails.
-
Alternatively, if it slams into something at high speed it explodes just like regular TNT, removing rails and without the power based on speed factor, making it inconsistent, this won't bother me but there's a few issues:
This works for Entities and Blocks, the issue is that while going around corners the Cart might randomly blow up, also when placed near other carts and a player moving near it, the cart might get pushed into the other cart "glitches" and glitches out of it, exploding, had that happen on my server by accident, quite a mess...
Alternatively, if Mojang can fix it so it only really explodes when it should, then I'll gladly take that, but think we can simply have it blow up when going over a activator Rail.
Edit2:
Rails Placed on player orientation/rotation
Basically instead of "autoconnecting"(outside of doing corners) minecart rails are now placed based on player rotation, meaning that it's possible to have two tracks next to eachother without issues.
Changes to Improve Furnace Minecarts!
(more of a Bugfix than anything,also Minecart Update!)
Improved Armor Textures, 1.8 Skins, Player Skins, Transpaceny and more!
I like this. I would love to see minecarts become more useful in general. Currently it's a huge pain to lay large minecart tracls due to the massive cost in Iron and Gold. I think in addition to this they should change the crafting recipe for rails from iron ingots to iron nuggets, so we can make more of them more easily. Currently horses, boats and elytra are far better ways to get around quickly.
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Thanks for reading this(and lovely Spider Avatar).
True, it's still a pain, although I did think that the crafting recipe was changed to give more rails?
Not to talk about a different game, but Terraria does have Minecart Tracks since a while as well and there it works, first thought it's because Iron's more common there(not as common as Coal in MC but still common), however looks like I remembered wrong and using one iron bar(3 ore) and 1 wood, they produce 30, now buffed up to 50 Rails.
-
I was thinking if MC's should be maybe doubled to 32, shouldn't really cause balance issues, no?
And you do use up 6 iron for this which is quite a large amount, makes me wonder if they should give a stack but that's a bit overkill I guess.
Hmm, the other rails are 6, can't see it in the Changelog but were they 6 at one point in time before being changed to 16?
Think we can increase those up to 8, if not 16 as well, but 16 might be a little too much.
Iron Ingots is a good idea, since those exist now, bars are kinda much for rails anyways, didn't get to fully read your comment(and have this window open for about 10 hours I guess) before due to being interrupted and busy with other things today, so I didn't see that part until now. I was wondering if the crafting recipe should be changed to 4 iron and 2 sticks, but ingots allow us to keep the original recipe which is what I'd prefer.
So changing iron/gold bars to their ingot forms would already be a quick and easy change that would help, together with updating the Minecarts.
Regarding other means of transport, I really want to avoid my horse getting damaged or falling in battle so to say, although they are a good feature and I do like them as well as donkeys and mules(but can we please just have a way to get the chests off of them?) also since they have different stats they aren't that easily "replaceable".
Boats are good, but require water, also luckily no longer break which helps a lot.
Elytra are rare and with only a limited amount of them, I wouldn't feel confortable in using them other for some fun flights from mountains(but they only seem to really work well in special worlds or when having Fireworks ready) or having keepinventory=True, as I really wouldn't want to lose them, also want mending on them so I never get to the point where I'm unable to fix them(makes one wonder if the Anvil Mechanics are ok like that)
But I do get what you mean, and yeah, Minecarts(in a game about Mining) do definitely deserve an update.
Changes to Improve Furnace Minecarts!
(more of a Bugfix than anything,also Minecart Update!)
Improved Armor Textures, 1.8 Skins, Player Skins, Transpaceny and more!
Railways are NOT expensive at all; I mine an average about 200 iron ore per hour of caving - enough to make 533 rails - and about 24 gold ore - enough for 24 powered rails - and with a spacing of 1 powered rail for every 32 regular rails that is enough for 792 blocks of track - making iron the limiting resource (never mind that i do not even make regular rails because of the amounts i find in mineshafts - more than 1,000 in a single play session on a couple occasions! All the gold I've taken from minecarts in mineshafts has also more than offset the gold I used).
In my first world I have around 15,000 blocks of railways connecting all of my bases - while I could make a railway more than 1.3 million blocks long with all the iron, gold, and rails that I've collected - the amount of gold I've collected is about 100 times higher than what I've used for powered rails - I even have 538 more gold stored in blocks than the ore I've mined can account for (some of which was also lost; once I craft resources into blocks I do not uncraft them again, I keep a stack of gold ingots on hand for making more powered rails as needed):
I recently collected all of this stuff from 9 separate mineshafts and associated caves and ravines - more than 16000 resources and loot, including 2739 rails (stored as 304 "rail blocks", a mod block I made that compacts 9 rails into one block, plus 3 rails), 2772 iron (308 blocks), and 396 gold (44 blocks) - altogether enough to make a railway 10527 blocks long with one powered rail every 26.6 blocks (i.e. closer together than I place them, except at the ends):
Seriously, the game is called "Minecraft" - and you clearly do not need to have my playstyle (100:1 ratio of resources collected/used) to get plenty of resources (I've even seen people make an iron farm just to get "on a rail"! A basic iron farm only yields around 40 iron per hour, so they are really willing to spend the time to build one and wait 9-10 hours over a couple hours of mining? Gold is also relatively more common than what I've found if you stay below y=32, where it is 1/5 as common as iron - or above y=32 in a mesa biome, where it is more concentrated than iron is).
ETA: since 1.8 a single chunk has had an average of more than 100 iron and about 10 gold (more than in 1.6.4, the version I still play in, and in fact I've found that I can collect ores even faster; the simpler, if much less interesting, caves also help. This does not include mesas, which have as much additional gold as iron and 10% more veins of gold overall).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
You might want to use the iron and gold for something else, or store it up later for Beacons, besides, the point is that most of the playerbase won't spend that much iron on rails, if you feel like doing it, then fine, but others might not and they are somewhat pricy, don't see anything wrong with changing the recipe to ingots.
Also Iron Farms are renewable where mining iron isn't.
There's also multiplayer to take into account where you don't have the entire world for yourself and can't just hog all resources.
Changes to Improve Furnace Minecarts!
(more of a Bugfix than anything,also Minecart Update!)
Improved Armor Textures, 1.8 Skins, Player Skins, Transpaceny and more!