How To Use Minecarts And Rails! ▫ The Minecraft Survival Guide [Part 222]

hello everyone my name is Pixar IFS and welcome back to the Minecraft Survival Guide hope you guys are having a good day today's episode is going to be a bit of a break from the normal a lot of the time I like to demonstrate things in this series with a practical example for example I could talk theoretically about villages and village of breeding or I could make a villager breeder like the one up there on the hill today I don't really have a practical example for how to put some of this stuff into practice but I thought we would spend a bit of time going over some theoretical stuff about mine carts and minecart rails because I get a lot of people asking me about how to use certain types of rails like detector rails and activator rails how explaining how certain things work with mine carts and minecart rails in general and I also get this a lot about redstone components like redstone comparators so I thought it might be kind of useful for people to go over these in theory even if I don't have a practical use for them right the second this is also going to be a week that is themed around mines and mine carts and I plan on doing some projects with minecart sub later in the week but today I felt like we should probably go over the basics and have a video where all of the information is contained in one place so even though we have used mine carts and minecart rails and all different types of mine carts extensively throughout the rest of this series this could be an episode II who come - if you want a bit of a refresher if you want to know exactly how these things operate and and work from a theoretical point of view so we are going to spend a little bit of time crafting up some of the ingredients that we'll need for today we'll need mine carts rails of old kinds and the different types of mine carts and that kind of thing and then we're going to get into a little bit of a test out here in this nice open testing area we'll even go over some of the hidden mechanics that these components have and then you'll be primed to use mine carts to the best of your ability and we can carry on with the rest of the stuff we're going to do the rest of the week so to start off with we're going to take a look at the basics how to craft mine carts and minecart rail the humble minecart is crafted using five iron ingots basically in an upside-down helmet shape like so au shape but without the top corners there and that's going to get us one minecart you'll be probably making a lot of mine carts throughout your time in Minecraft if you plan on doing technical stuff with them so you'll probably want to have a reliable source of iron if not an iron farmed at least a substantial mining operation that's got you a fair amount of iron ore the rest of this comes from the iron farm though because the iron farm is definitely worth it we're also going to craft some rails using six iron ingots and a stick in the center there which is going to get you sixteen rail very very useful crafting recipe and of course a pretty decent amount of rail four of these will get you a full stack of minecart rail and it's definitely worth having that of course as you saw from this shelcha box I already have a fair few stacks of minecart rails so we're not going to worry too much about that you can also find minecart rails in abandoned mineshafts and in the abandoned mineshaft minecart chests they're the loot chests that generate with those mine shafts you will also find some of the other variants of rails which are activator rails detector rails and powered rails and we will discuss what each of those does as we continue through this video mine carts are primarily used for player transport and also for mob transport we have used them several times throughout this series to transport mobs of various kinds including things like zombies villages shelters even there is very little limits to what can be contained in a minecart and they do become very very useful for transporting things that you don't necessarily want to get to up close and personal with we can transport passive mobs like villages and cows by using boats but we don't necessarily want to get in a boat with something that can hurt us like zombies or Vindicator x' for example so mine carts are often crucial in transporting stuff around my carts have a few other uses though and that is in crafting to create other types of mine carts we have three examples here one where you can combine it with a chest to get a minecart with chest one way you combined with a hopper to get a hopper minecart and another with TNT and the TNT one you might not be using all that much but they have some very interesting properties that might be worth exploring a little bit later there is a fourth special minecart that is available in survival and that is the furnace minecart furnace mine carts were originally implemented as a means of propulsion so that you could add fuel to them and they would move automatically down and minecart track pushing any other mine carts with them and it was going to be like they were going to be the engine as though it was a steam engine kind of thing connected to the other mine carts as a bunch of carriages but furnace mine carts have largely been considered obsolete for a while because power ray'll was implemented into the game powered rails as the name suggests are something that you can apply redstone power to to accelerate the travel of minecarts up to a certain speed at which point additional powered rails will just maintain the speed and allow you to travel or allow other minecarts to travel along the rails without the need for any additional propulsion as you can see I've got quite a lot of powered rail in here and powered rail is crafted with gold all we need is a little bit of extra redstone as well and instead of using iron ingots for the tracks you use gold ingots you put one redstone dust there a stick in the middle and six gold ingots down the site and that gets you fewer powered rails than it would get you normal rails using iron this gets you six powered rails so you'll probably want a reasonable supply of gold before you embark on crafting a whole bunch of this our next two examples for rails require a couple of redstone components and I've crafted up a few stone pressure plates here we'll also need a few redstone torches as well and in order to create activator rail and detector rail we will need some of these components now let's see we place six iron ingots in the rail position like that we leave a stick out of the crafting recipe we put a stone pressure plate in the middle there and redstone dust at the bottom and that will get you six detector rails now it's unlikely that you're gonna need to craft a large number of detector rails so the fact that this only gets you six detector rails is really not such a bad thing you've you won't find yourself using these all that much last but not least an activator rail is a kind of similar but slightly different recipe you want to put a redstone torch in the middle of the rail here and put sticks either side like that and that's gonna get you six activator rail likewise activator rails are unlikely to be something you need all the time so six activator rail is not bad for the price back out here in our testing ground I can show you a little bit about how these are going to work first of all I will point out that you can't place mine carts anywhere other than a rail it is possible for them to exist outside of rails but when you want to place one you will need to place one of the four types of rail in order to put the minecart into the world in the first place you can push it off like so at which point we can remove the rail and it will still roll around when pushed by a player or another entity but largely speaking it's not really going to roll around as much as it would if it's on Rails they can be pushed on two rails though which makes it nice and easy to just snap a minecart onto a rail and push it towards its destination when you place a minecart out in the world you can break it again by attacking it with your hands or with any tool and once you've done that a couple of times it will break down into its components so if we had a furnace minecart there that has now broken down into a furnace and a minecart and that we could craft it back into a minecart with furnace once again but I don't really want to do that because as I mentioned furnace minecarts are a bit rubbish so instead what I'm gonna do is place the minecart back in the world get in it and go forward by holding the forward button which as you can see does not let you travel very fast you will pick up a little bit of speed as you travel along a minecart rail but one of the ways of picking up speed without using any other kind of external means of powering the minecart is to have downward slopes in it because of course gravity allows you to travel a little bit faster and you'll find yourself picking up a little bit of speed however each time you roll over the rail you will start to lose speed and obviously when we come off the end of the rail here we'll come to a complete stop but eventually you'll find yourself running out of momentum as we roll along in the minecart at a very very slow speed you'll find yourself slowing down even more and even more until eventually you'll come to a complete stop and that is really where powered rails come into effect if we place a powered rail into this section here if we turn that on using a redstone torch just attached to a nearby block and then we ride on this with a minecart it's going to accelerate us as we travel over that powered rail you'll notice we get a little bit of acceleration from the downhill and a fair amount of acceleration from the powered rail and that will last for a good long section of track probably about 20 blocks or so before you need to hit another powered rail or the minecart will start slowing down before we move any further it's worth noting that regular minecart rail without any of the additional redstone components in it is the only type of track which can curve around corners if we try and do something like this with a powered rail a detector rail or an activator rail you will find that none of them are able to turn corners they always attach straight to the rest of the rails and for example here we would need to have a curve like so made out of regular rail in order to connect this up as a continuous piece of track and curved sections of track create some interesting behavior that's worth noting here while we're talking about some of the basics of Minecraft travel if I have a curved section of track here any time I enter it from this side or this side any of the sections which are connected by this curve the minecart is going to follow that curve around so I'm going to travel along this way if I end up traveling along here I'm going to curve around to the right and end up on this section when I come from this side though where the minecart rail does not appear to be connected and has a curve in the bend here I am going to travel straight across this and end up coming out the other side the minecart does a bit of a wobble in the middle but it stays true to the direction I was traveling in the first place applying redstone power to a curved section of track whether it comes from immediately next to the track itself or whether it powers the block the curve is sitting on will actually enable you to switch the direction of the curve which can be useful in some situations and can even be automated to have rail lines take you to completely different places however it is possible to create some four-way intersections like this for example where we don't have a curve in the track at all by building a straight track across here and a track kind of intersecting it which does not have a four-way interchange here we're gonna place the minecart here and of course that when entering this connected track from either side we're just going to be able to coast straight across and come out the other side but when entering it from either of these two sides something a little bit different happens and this is what is called the southeast rule of minecart behavior if we enter the track from this side we're actually going to end up finding ourselves on the connected track here and traveling in a southward direction will demonstrate it now this is the south facing direction if I get in the minecart here and push myself onto the track as you can see we end up travelling southward and that isn't just to do with the direction I'm facing either if I enter the track from this side and end up going this way I still find myself traveling southward and this track here goes north south but if I create another intersection here where the main section of rail the connected section of rail goes east-west we're going to find ourselves traveling east if we end up on this section of the track let's take a quick look at that in action yet there we go we ended up traveling east so that is the southeast rule of minecart behavior whenever they enter an intersection where there is not an obvious curve to the track they will end up preferring to travel south or east we talked a little bit about the minecart speed and needing powered rail in order to travel but that actually varies depending on whether the minecart has a passenger or not let's take a look at a quick example here so if I place a powered rail a few blocks down the way here let's put one right here at the very end and we'll send a minecart traveling down this rail now the minecart is going to have a certain amount of momentum from the powered rail but you'll find that without a player in it it doesn't keep the momentum for as long so if I place the minecart here it's actually only going to make it about seven or eight blocks before it slows to a complete stop with a player in it like so it's actually going to be able to travel a lot further and I hit this powered rail and continue on this is true of mine carts with any kind of passengers and also mine carts with chests which technically speaking have a passenger it's just the chest itself is the passenger you can do the same thing with hopper mine carts as well meaning hopper mine carts can actually travel a decent distance before they need to be powered by another powered rail in order to keep going although it might be worth while placing powered rail kind of frequently if you think something might be able to get onto the track and slow it down the basic functionality of hopper mine carts and chest mine carts is something you're probably familiar with already and we've been over it several times in the series before but I'll cover it again here just so that we understand so a chest line car act just as a movable chest you can place items in it it can output to a hopper if it is a if it's running over a rail that the hopper is on for example if I put a hopper down here have the rail run over the top of it like that items will start to drain out of the chest minecart even if it's just slightly intersecting with the hopper and even in fact if the rail isn't present at all as long as it's over the top of the hopper it will still continue to drain items out into the hopper like so and a hopper minecart acts like a movable hopper but there are a few things that distinguish it from a hopper the first is the speed at which it picks things up because whatever I'm able to throw at it here it will pick it all up pretty much instantaneously the speed at which hopper mine carts pull items into themselves is very very cool and one of the other things we can do is place a solid block over the top here and throw items down on top of that and those will be picked up by the hopper minecart through the block itself as long as it is resting on a rail if we take the rail away you will find that it is no longer able to do that as reliably but the hitbox of the hopper minecart doesn't quite intersect with the block above although I don't think it's really a whole lot to do with the hitbox and more to do with just the position of this entity in comparison to the block above it but if you have it resting on a rail or if it's you know moving around on a rail underneath a pad of blocks you'll find that items get picked up through it nice and easily and full stacks of items can get thrown into a hopper minecart in much the same way as they end up in a hopper but if you put items in a chest above it and have a hopper minecart pull items out of that inventory it will pull them at a much faster rate than a hopper does unfortunately the transfer rate out of the hopper minecart is dependent on the hopper that's transferring it out rather than the hopper minecart itself so as you will see when we take this away the hopper only transfers them at a normal speed it's down to the the hopper to pull items out instead of the hopper minecart pushing the items amps nonetheless if you want a really quick item pickup but the hopper minecart is indispensable for that kind of thing it is super super useful and is often used before resource collection in a lot of high yield farms to get to the maximum speed a minecart can travel you'll need seven powered rails placed in succession so if you want the optimal travel speed placing powered rails seven blocks long like so is usually the best way of doing that because that will accelerate you as fast as you can possibly get nice and quickly this is especially useful to know when you're traveling up hills like this or creating a rollercoaster for the player for example you'll need seven powered rails in order to get to maximum speed and from there the player can ascend about 16 blocks worth of rail before you find yourself losing momentum and coming back down I've got 18 blocks of rail here and we'll get about two here and then we'll start to lose momentum and slide back down again so make sure you have some powered rail somewhere on the climb unless you want your climbs to be a little bit shorter than that another reliable way of doing this while minimizing your use of powered rail is to put a powered rail every fourth block up on the track so you put three regular rails and one powered rail you can power it from below like so with the redstone torch if you want to and that should allow us to ascend this slope cat the powered rail each time as we go and we make it to the top and then fall off the top because I didn't put anything behind that one thing it is worth noting about sloped rails is that the slope will stay here even if you take out the piece of track it is connected to which allows the minecart to still travel up here and just come to rest on a block up there this can be especially useful to create minecart stopping systems because if you place a block here and a block here the minecart will be able to travel under this block and hit this rail but then when it tries to come back down the slope here it will get stopped by this block I'll give you a quick example here if you place a powered rail there with a redstone torch next to it let's send our chest minecart over here on this powered rail it tucks itself under the block and then it stops here and if that's on top of a hopper or something like that that will allow this chest to drain its contents into the hopper you'll find that this gets used a lot in minecart loading and unloading stations I've got a hopper with a few items in it here if I push the minecart chest in there it gets stuck on that block and the hopper is slowly transferring the content into the chest minecart maybe once the minecart was full we could detect how many items were in it and then the block here could be removed allowing the minecart to travel on its way again a single redstone power source can power up to 17 pieces of minecart rail the central piece here and eight to either side so I'm going to count out one two three four five six seven eight on that side one two three four five six seven eight on that side now if we place any powered rail on either end of this line you'll find that it does not get powered because that's the maximum length that the power can travel now let's say for example that we want to take a few pieces of powered rail off of this end we cannot apply them to this end because they are too far away from the power source it will only travel eight blocks down here from that central powered one before the redstone signal completely runs out it's also worth noting that powered rails can be powered by a redstone signal of any strength I've extended this redstone dust out here so we're currently looking at a power of five but this is still going to be able to power eight blocks in each direction with the powered rail as you can see it's not diminished based on the amount of redstone current that is flowing into it we are getting the full length of the track here now let's take a look at what powered rail does when it is not powered by something I'm gonna stick a couple of them here but we shouldn't really need that many because when minecart is pushed over an unpowered rail it actually acts like a brake and it will force the minecart to stop on that block as you can see it managed to roll a little way off on to the next block but it is still pretty firmly stuck on this powered rail here until it receives power at which point with a little bit of momentum in one direction or the other the minecart can continue on its journey so if you want to have a minecart come to an abrupt stop somewhere like a station for example you just need to place down a piece of unpowered powered rail and you could easily have a button nearby that you could press to briefly power the rail send the minecart on its way and then allow you to continue traveling before we get into detector rail and activator rail I'll also briefly point out that while a piece of track can be sloped or curved it cannot be both say for example we wanted to have a minecart traveling here down a slope and then curving onto this block here unfortunately that couldn't be done as you'll see the minecart could end up traveling off this track where it would connect with this bottom section here but then it would roll into that block because there is no way of it traveling upwards minecarts will travel downwards onto tracks below them like that but they will not travel upwards again afterwards so it isn't really possible for a track to spiral upwards without a little bit of room for both a curve and a slope so when creating a track that spirals upwards you'll need to build the sloped section here and then leave yourself this kind of L shape up here so you can get to the top curve to the right curve that way and then continue the slope upwards like so if you were to continue the spiral staircase pan put a block there you wouldn't be able to get on to that track if you were moving upwards on the track here so you kind of need to leave that l-shaped section here allow yourself to curve the track around and then the next block here can start to provide the slope okay it's finally time to talk about our other two mysterious rail types activator rails and detector rails and I'm gonna take a look at detector rails first because I've already used them a couple of times in this series and they are pretty useful for what they do a detector rail will as the name suggests detect a minecart traveling over it and will output a redstone signal as that minecart travels over it we're gonna place a minecart directly on top of this detector rail here and take a redstone output from it as you can see that's giving off a pretty strong signal and pretty sure it is actually a power level of 15 and this is a regular minecart a minecart without content doesn't really need to have anything in it it can have a player riding in it the same thing happens and as you'll see when we run a minecart over the top of it it activates briefly while a minecart travels over the top and then deactivates again once the minecart has traveled on it's worth noting the detector rail also powers the block that it's standing on so if we place a redstone lamp here and activate it like so that's actually getting power from the grass block underneath here likewise if we put the redstone lamp underneath there as you can see it is lit which means that the grass block here is the thing that's providing power is channeling the power through the detector rail there but arguably the most useful aspect of detector rails comes when they are used in conjunction with a comparator because when placed adjacent to a detector rail like this a comparator will give off a signal not when the minecart is sat on the detector rail although the detector rail is still giving off redstone signal from other directions instead the comparator will detect how full a hopper minecart or chest minecart resting on top of the detector rail is right now it's completely empty and as you can see the comparator here is not giving off any signal whatsoever if we now fill that with a few items let's use unstackable items like the Shilka box and a couple of mine carts for the strongest signal you will see that this is now outputting a signal proportional to the amount of stuff that's in the hopper minecart because we have four unstackable items here it's outputting four-fifths power or twelve redstone power right now if we match to fill that up with another stack of something that's now outputting the strongest amount of redstone power it can because the minecart with a hopper is full in this brief example here I've created a circuit where every time the hopper passes over this detector rail it's contents are detected and that powers this section of powered rail here once the hopper minecart has passed over this hopper a couple of times it's going to deposit its content into the hopper they'll end up in this chest and each time it travels over this detector rail the signal would be a little bit smaller once it's passed over a few times and deposited all its contents in this chest it will actually come to rest over the top of this powered rail because there will no longer be enough power coming from the detector rail circuit over here for it to power this rail perhaps at that point the hopper minecart could be refueled by a refueling station over here or as in the case of the smoker setup that I built it could be redirected into a filling station that in on a slope so that it can receive a bunch of items and then travel back around this circuit again so let's add the other mine carts that we had before will add the Shilka box will add the TNT minecart and let's send this thing off on its way so it'll travel around the circuit each time it goes around it'll deposit something in there it'll light up the powered rail one more time and then the powered rail no longer lights up because the comparator is not detecting any contents for the minecart hopper everything is here in this chest and the hopper minecart stops on this piece of powered rail here it's also worth noting that the comparator can still detect the contents of a hopper minecart or chest minecart through a solid block which allows you to be a little bit more discreet with your placement of the rest of the stuff in this redstone circuit so that's detector rails now let's take a look at activator rails which have a few really interesting quite unique uses which don't come up all that often but they can be very very useful in some circumstances now for a start you'll notice that the activator rail here is not being powered by the redstone torch that is activating this section of powered rail it requires its own individual power source in order to be activated and you'll find that a lot of the uses of activator rail require it to be powered in the first place let's ride the minecart on top of here and let's see what happens when we ride over the activator rail as you can see it deposits me out of the minecart and it will usually try and do that I believe in a southerly direction but that is of course kind of dependent on which blocks are available so if you ride over it like so it'll deposit me off to the side which doesn't have a block on it and so by blocking off the area around this activator rail but leaving one block open we can guarantee that we'll be thrown out onto that block for a sample if I ride over the rail now you'll notice I get dropped off in this area and the minecart will still shake one it's on the activator rail there which kind of implies that it's not going to allow anything to jump into it and as you can see if I try and get into it I'm ejected in all sorts of random directions although interestingly not the direction that we initially got ejected while we still have momentum traveling in the minecart but you will find that this mechanic is quite useful especially if you want to dispose of some villagers because all you need to do is have them right into a section that has an activator rail in it block off all but one block and then maybe have a lava pit down here or something like that so one use of a powered activator rail is to throw out anything that is currently sitting in the minecart that's mobs that's players basically any entity that's riding in the minecart will be ejected if it crosses over a powered activator rail a whole section of activator rail like this can also be powered from the same redstone source so while it doesn't share a power source with the powered rail here it can all be activated by a single redstone torch however one activator rail is often more than enough unlike powered rail though it doesn't end up slowing the player down a whole bunch while you are riding over it it can still more or less act like a normal rail and of course the same goes for detector rail by the way didn't mention that earlier but yes detector rails can be ridden over just the same as regular rails can and of course one of the more destructive uses of activator rails perhaps one of the more obvious ones as well is that it can be used to prime TNT minecarts so as soon as we push it over there onto the activator rail you'll notice the TNT primes and explosions happen you will notice though that the TNT explosion does not affect any of the blocks which have rails placed on them we've encountered examples of this before but it kind of makes logical sense it would not make any sense at all for the minecart to blow up a section of the rail that it had been traveling on moments before of course luckily for me TNT explosions including TNT minecart explosions now drop 100% of the blocks they destroy in Java edition at least so no blocks destroyed here but perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of activator rail low and one that I don't see getting used all that much but I think it's actually really interesting and unique is its ability to prevent hopper minecarts from picking up items if I place it down on top of this activator rail here and I throw say a few smooth stone slabs on the floor here you would expect the hole mine cart to pick these up normally however it does not in fact I can pick them up again myself and if I step back a second here and try and look in the inventory of this hopper minecart you'll see it's not picking up anything at all normally hopper mine carts are able to pick up any items that they rollover or any items that come within the hitbox of the hopper minecart and activator rails disabled that and the only way to re-enable it is to have it travel over an inactive activator rails so now for example once I've rolled it over that inactive activator rail if I throw the items on the ground here they're all getting picked up by the hopper minecart and quite quickly - if I roll it back this way if I roll it over the active activator rail and attempt to throw those in again none of them get picked up so this is actually a kind of interesting functionality let's create a little example here that we can use to test this out so let's have an activator rail here underneath this chest from which the hopper minecart is going to be pulling all of its items and let's create a little circuit around the outside here so that each time the hopper minecart passes over this hopper it's going to be depositing items that will end up in this chest let's set up a comparator detecting the contents of this hopper and as soon as the hopper starts to become full it will output a redstone signal let's boost that with this repeater have that travel into this block here powering the block and powering the activator rail which will enable the activator rail and disable the hopper minecart from picking up any more items from this chest for the rest of this we'll need a couple of powered rails just to make sure that the minecart continues around the circuit I think the rest of these can be regular rails without the hopper minecart actually stopping anywhere and let's get a bunch of items to fill this chest up with in fact the faster example here is going to be to make this a dispenser so it has a smaller inventory than the chests over here in the hopper fills up a little bit faster but let's instead of having this chest here let's just place a shulker box that is full of mine carts over the top of here so it's going to be picking up a bunch of these each time it passes underneath the chest now let's set the hopper minecart on its travels like so it should be picking up a few hopper mine carts with each pass there we go and it looks like it's filling up with a hopper minecart each time it travels over there now it's going to activate the activator rail very briefly each time it over here because it's depositing something in the in the hopper there but as soon as the hopper completely fills up and starts broadcasting a redstone signal constantly you'll notice that it's no longer picking up any new items it's still depositing the items in the hopper over there but it's not picking up anything new and that is because the activator rail here has disabled the pickup functionality of the hopper minecart which could be incredibly useful if you have a slow system out here that's outputting the contents and the hopper minecart is picking up an absolute ton of stuff from the chest with each pass because they can pick up several items even if they're under there very very briefly and of course if we take some of the mine carts out of this dispenser and re-enable the circuit again you'll see the activator rail there turns back off which reenable x' the hopper minecart and it starts pulling stuff out of the shelcha box here all over again so there you go folks if you ever wondered what an activator rail actually does there are a few examples for you and hopefully you guys will be inspired to find some ways to use these in your minecart rail circuits and I hope you guys have enjoyed this look at mine carts and minecart rails a little bit of a theory heavy episode as I mentioned at the start but we're probably going to try and do a few more episodes like this in future may be covering redstone components and stuff like that so if there's anything you would like to see do let me know in the comments of this video if you enjoyed the video make sure to drop a like on it subscribe if you want to see more and I will see you guys soon take care bye for now [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Pixlriffs

Views: 381,701

Rating: 4.9193978 out of 5

Keywords: Pixlriffs, Minecraft, Let's, Play, Survival, gameplay, PC, SSP, Tutorial, Minecraft Survival Guide, Minecraft Survival Let's Play, Survival Single Player, Minecraft survival series, Minecraft survival tips, How to Survive in Minecraft, Java Edition, Minecraft 1.14, Minecarts, Minecart Rail, How to use Minecart, How to use detector rail, How to use Activator rail, What does Activator Rail do, What does detector rail do, Minecraft activator rail, Minecraft detector rail

Id: JE0C8nN-ndc

Length: 30min 16sec (1816 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 10 2019