The Ultimate Minecraft 1.20 Minecart & Rail Guide

Minecraft has a whole system of items rails and mine carts designed to create transportation systems for mobs items and players so in this video I’ll explain everything about them so of course for the fundamentals of mine carts and rails basically how it works is that for every type of mine cart they

Also need to be on top of rails of course in certain scenarios mine carts need power to go higher up and there’s different types of mine carts and different types of rails that all serve different purposes also basically any mob or player can get inside of mine

Carts if they’re the right size and there’s a ton of redstone purposes surrounding all these different components let’s start with rails what are the main types of rails and how do they work well there are four rail types power detector Rail and activator rail powered rails are crafted with gold one

Stick and res stone dust and that gives you six and then standard rails are crafted with six iron ingots and one stick and that gives you 16 rails the activator rail is crafted with two sticks one red stone torch and six iron ingots and finally detect derails don’t

Actually use sticks in the recipe but they do have six iron ingots one stone pressure plate and Redstone Dust for six well let’s start with the standard rail what can it do basically standard rails can be placed almost anywhere you’d like but something you may notice is that in

Certain patterns it’ll be cut off like this that’s because you can’t turn and go upwards at the same time with standard rails however another important thing to be aware of is that rails cannot go down one block then up the same block it just doesn’t work and they

Cannot go down two blocks at once if you place these in a two by two it’ll make a circular pattern with rails and the one big difference between normal rails and all other types of rails is that where normal rails can turn all other rail types don’t actually have a turn variety

They only work going straight but speaking of other rail types let’s go on to the powered rail powered rails as you would think are used to power a mine cart for instance right here we could power this mine curtain make it go up the Hill like this the thing is with

Powered rails you cannot make them go in circular configurations and so because of that if you wanted to let’s say make a circular track that goes infinitely you’d have to do something like this with powered rails all connected to a redstone torch or even just to a lever

Either of those will work to power these on maybe even a redstone block if you want then of course you get on the mine cart and have that mine cart go on there forever but then to stop it all we have to do is right click on that again and

Something you may notice is it actually stopped really abruptly and I’ll show you why let’s on this track right here put a singular unpowered Rail and then let’s put right next to it a standard rail as the power and powered rails will connect other powered rails but cannot

Go between unpowered rails so for instance this line of redstone will keep going this way but eventually will stop and actually if we place powered rails this direction for a long time eventually they will power off because it’s gone far enough away from the torch so there’s not enough power for it to

Continue on as it goes eight blocks away from the power forward block but anyway with this one on powered rail here if we place it down on this incline and just go down you’ll notice the minecart actually gets stuck on the side of the rail here without going any further and

That’s because powered rails when they’re not being powered is a natural break this is actually a really cool thing because what you can do is you could let’s say have a mine cart ride like this where you go on it and it’s basically completely still of course I’m

Pressing W here so I actually go forward if we get close to this lever here we can flick that then we can actually make ourselves be powered all the way up here also instead of just having to punch mine Curts randomly to pick them up the

Trick to basically pick up a mine carts really simple just think of it as a mob you’re killing so basically if we have like an ax or something there’s more damage there that is going to break that a lot quicker and that’s exactly the

Same as it would work if it was a boat a really important thing to keep in mind is the fact that powered rails can only Power mine cards or speed them up to a certain level they can’t actually exponentially power your Minecarts to go faster and faster stir and so once that

Minecart gets to a certain speed it’s just gonna stay there and actually I’ll go into a little bit later what the best way is to lay out powered rails to not waste them now here’s something important it is the detector rail detector rails are almost always used with standard rails and powered rails

Now the opinion tends to be fairly split on whether or not detector rails are worth it but more or less here’s how they work if a minecart goes on top of a detector rail it’ll power the other rails next to it or really will power

Anything else next to it it’s kind of an alternative to laying out powered rails and just having them always on with a detector rail only a mine cart can turn those on so for instance you could have a setup looking something like this instead of the rail you have a detector

Rail on either side it’d kind of go between a bunch of powered rails then one detector rail and if you come to a turn of course that would change but generally it would be a system like this now the only problem of this tends to be

If the mine cart got stopped and you’re going on here it’s actually really really hard to get started again with those powered rails to stay on one the problem is too because these can power anything around them if we place down the mine cart right here and light it

Along the track we could actually have these other blocks of TNT next to the side go off without us being able to control that or not and although of course that does make us a very cool self-destructing Railway it is not something that is entirely practical so

Overall it’s kind of up to you whether or not you use detect derails but for me personally I do just like using them as it is kind of cool to see powered rails only be on when you’re traveling over them the only thing that’s important to

Know about detector rails is they do not work if they’re going sideways what do I mean by that well let’s say we have a detector rail right here and it’s kind of in a slope as of course every rail can be in its flat or sort of sloped

Position and then we ride a mine cart all the way down here what will happen is as we ride along the track you’ll notice this will turn on but it will not send power to the rails next to it it actually will send the power when we’re

Going downwards but when it’s going the opposite direction you’ll see it just does not send the power up I’m not sure if this is about or not but because of this if you’re using this design you have to be very careful to make sure that this stays powered on and as well

As not to never let the detector rails be at an angle or this entire track will be made one way but fundamentally you can definitely think of this as a minecart pressure plate and now finally for the last used Rail and that is the activator rail the activator rail will

Basically do only a couple things and it does need to be powered on for this to happen so if we ride over that nothing’s gonna happen but if we power it and then ride over it basically it’ll just hop us out of the mine cart automatically there

As I did not decide to get out there it simply automatically got me out of the mine cart so that’s the first thing it does is it ejects mobs from mine Curts which is definitely a funny use but again I’m not touching anything it just automatically pops me out right there

What is interesting though is if a minecart just sits on top of one of these that’s powered it’ll actually rotate back and forth like that which I think is being used to visually represent it trying to get a player out and because of that you can actually use

This and build to sort of look like a Crusher or a grinder of of some sort the only other thing it does it can disable mine carts with Hoppers so if a hopper mine cart goes over one of these it’ll just stop picking up items now this is

Disabled and you can see it definitely is it’s not picking up anything we can re-enable it by making it roll over a unpowered activator Rail and if we throw something next to this now it’ll definitely go into that mine cart with hopper it can also power on a minecart

With command block or it can ignite a minecart with TNT that does not instantly explode like a minecart with TNT normally would if it just drops it’ll actually go through a full ignition phase the rails are a bit expensive and of course if you’re making a huge Minecart Track which I would

Suggest it definitely takes up to thousands of rails here’s a good trick to not have to deal with that if you don’t mind using duplicators basically start by placing an observer going downwards then Place Another Observer going up into that to make an eternally running Observer clock you can see

That’s turning on and off place a random block on top of there and a stick piston going off the side then a lever here turn it off so it stops going back and forth now if the slime blocks make a long L shape so put two here and then

Off of that put these other blocks then we’re gonna go on top of here and place the Observer like this so that the Redstone dot on the back there is facing the Slime and in here Place whatever types of rails you want to duplicate you can duplicate any rails you want in

Minecraft that works with every type if we turn this on by just simply flicking the lever right here this basically instant rail Farm is now done and you can see here every time it goes back and forth all those rails there pop off but they also stay on the actual track and

So because of that we’re getting an insane amount of instantly duplicated free rails now to be fair a lot of servers don’t allow duplication on them and a lot of people consider duplicating to be cheating but it’s completely up to you and it is always a decent method if

You don’t have an iron firm or a gold firm and you want to get yourself a ton of rails let’s move on from rails though and go to mine carts the there are seven different types of mine Curts in Minecraft however only five of them are obtainable in survival first of all we

Have the command block Minecart which works basically how you’d think if it’s over an activator rail it’ll turn on and of course having a command inside of it it can definitely be useful for map makers next we have the spawner mine cart and the spawner Minecart also works

Very similarly to how you think it’s basically a mobile monster spawner and it always starts as being a pig spawner and then of course we have the standard mine Curt this is basically used to have one mob inside of it so unlike let’s say

A boat it can only hold one mob and that is a pretty useful Minecart of course and there is the minecart chest now mine Curt chest if you right click on them can store things inside of it like right there so it’s sort of a good way of transporting items and something really

Good to know about all these different items is that when you break them they now break as one item whereas it used to be you’d break this and you’d get the minecart and the chest separately but now you actually get it as as one thing there’s also the furnace mine cart you

Right click on the furnace Minecart with coal and it’s basically its own steam-powered train as long as it’s on top of rails that is and it’ll push things around it for a while then we have the mine cart with hopper this is a super powerful Hopper and for example

Here if we throw items above it all the way up here it is still close enough for it to pick it up unlike a standard Hopper where things have to be really really close this can be used to grab items in a really wide radius near it

Which makes it ideal for basically any type of farm and of course finally we have the mine cart with TNT now this is more powerful than your standard TNT as you saw right there the one piece can actually blow up quite a bit but because of the expense of the iron associated

With them it’s generally not worthwhile but either way that is all seven types of mine carts and what they do now one thing that is important to know is how to actually use the hopper mine carts in the chest mine carts effectively because of course you can put things in them but

How do you automatically get things out of it if there is an empty Hopper underneath the mine cart with hopper it will take the items inside of it and slowly put them inside that item Hopper and the same is true with a mine cart with chest if we put that above your

Input items in it it’ll also have those items slowly drained down now if we have a hopper above one of these Mayan current chests this will also happen these will drain from the Hopper into the chest in fact believe it or not if you have a hopper mine cart beneath the

Chest that’ll actually take items directly out of a chest absolutely no Hopper needed but that is fundamentally how you move items around with hopper mine carts and just mine carts alright so what is the best pattern for your Minecart tracks and there are some very strange patterns you can do where you

Basically have Minecart circles going into each other and the sort of makes it set your Minecart is going from corner to corner to corner although this is technically one of the fastest configurations you can do the problem is it actually takes so much time to set it

Up it basically removes any benefit of actually doing it however that is technically an option you can do if we applicant standard configurations let’s start with some tests what’s quicker if we have this Minecart Track going over this for a long distance going up and

Down or on the flat distance if we took this Minecart Rail and laid it out flat it would definitely be a lot longer than this one as it’s of course sort of squinched up like that so if we place a redstone torch right here which one goes

Faster well if you take a look they’re basically going at the exact same speed and the reason for this is because in the Minecraft code the amount of time it takes for a mine cart to go up and down rails is the exact same time it takes

Whether it’s going across one or going up one like this and so just be aware of that when planning out travel distances it absolutely does not matter whatsoever if the minecart is going up or down just only how long it actually goes in terms of blocks but it is very expensive to

Use only powered rails so what’s the minimum out of powered rails necessary if we do a pattern something like this this Minecart will keep going we can visibly see it slow and speed up again if we put a minecart here and here we already know these two you run at the

Same speed so we’re basically testing between these two which one of these ones will go faster let’s take a look if we see those are actually going at the exact same speed which again is very good news however if we have let’s say a minecart over here and a minecart over

Here you’ll notice this one is going way faster than that one it was actually started after that one but it came to the Finish Line first so you do want to add some powered rails to kind of get a speed boost first but after that there’s actually no benefit of powered rails

Unless they’re more than every four blocks apart and so next time you’re laying out your Minecart Track I definitely recommend that pattern having one powered rail for unpowered one powered for powered this is especially good if you’re not using a rail duplicator because then you’re still getting maximum power you’re also not

Having to use too many powered rails now this works great for straight line Minecart tracks or ones just go One Direction and then slowly go to the other direction but how do you actually make Junctions with your Minecart tracks well this can of course only be done with standard rails because they’re the

Only type of Minecraft track that can turn but here’s a good example of one we have a junction like this we won’t have the ability to have our mine cart go straight forward or to the side well all you have to do place down a lever next

To that and flick it you’ll notice when we flick this it’ll go between those two orientations and so now for writing our Minecart Track we can switch this last minute to go that direction or switch it again to make it go this direction and of course this works the other way as

Well either going this way if we turn it going that way if you want to do this so it’s not just a lever sticking to the side of a minecart what you can do is have a redstone torch underneath here so the torch is directly powering this

Block that has that mine Curt rail on it and then have Redstone go into the back of that block and have that Redstone go a ways away of course and then from there you can have that leading to a lever or whatever power source you want

It to be in fact it could even be something as simple as a detector rail then when we turn this this is also turning its direction so you can kind of see that so whatever you decide to do that is how you make a minecart Junction

And of course these can be automated as well for instance this could go to a protector rail how do you transport mobs in mine carts though well there’s a couple questions to this the first one I guess would be how do you even pick up the mobs a really important fact to know

About mobs is that the vast majority of them will not cross rails that’s right for instance we could surround the sheep and rails and if we do surround that sheep all the way it’ll never cross those rails we could even straight up punch a sheep inside of here and it’ll

Not try and cross those rails now for whatever reason mine carts will tend to pick up mobs the easiest if they’re on a corner rail like this so for instance we could push the Sheep right into the mine cart and then push the minecart onto that corner and if that sheep was

Actually still there at the same time because of course once we pushed it onto that corner it can then cross the rails we now have that sheep captured inside the mine cart now of course this is mostly for villagers so you want to do is push this towards the edge push that

Villager towards the edge I know that mine curtain villager are on the same block so of course once that villager is in the Mayan car you’ll just push it around and use it as per usual and so that’s basically how you transport mobs and mine carts something really cool I

Did on this specific Minecraft world is make a massive rail Transportation Network and I’ll try and show you very briefly what you want to do as well the first thing is to plan it out very extensively you’ll notice all around these maps are these long lines those

Are the minecart tracks and I’ve marked them out by having them be on top of wood or by having path blocks on either side and so for instance there’s a Minecart Track that goes across here then one that goes through here and over here down to here these are actually

Incredibly large mine cart tracks so Step One is planning it and you want to build a railway station and make sure to have at the railway station a bunch of mine carts and different signs that lead you to different areas so for instance we go on this track right here we have

The configuration of the powered and the detector rails and all these sections start with kind of like a Subway type track because they’re underground for a while as they go underneath the city but after that then they eventually go above ground so for instance right here we we

Were just going underneath a river there and once we get to the other side we’ll eventually appear on the other side of the river that’s really cool is let’s say from this station we can continue on going to other areas this will say this goes to the Central City station this

One to the North Central Village station but more or less that’s how you make a series of Minecart tracks and stations it’s actually pretty simple you just want to make sure that it is a fairly easy system to use also there are some really cool automations people can do so

For instance having your mine carts be broken by Cactus or automatically dispensed by dispensers it is a very good idea before you decide to make your Minecart Track what kind of configuration you want to use also as something now very important to know mine carts and rails can now totally

Work even if they’re underwater so for instance right here if we go on this Minecart Track you can see we can actually travel all the way across here underwater inside of here it’s just a bit slower underwater but still kind of a fun option if you want to you can have

All your Minecart rides be underwater you just need to make sure to have yourself some water breathing or you could definitely drown but it could still definitely be a fun thing with mine carts to make a small section that dips underwater anyway that is everything about mine carts and

Minecraft if you enjoyed the video make sure to press the like button subscribe to see more content like this and I will see you in the next video goodbye