Learn how to build a Minecart track with this Minecraft tutorial.
Okay, let’s go over how to build a mine cart track in Minecraft. Tracks and carts are a huge element of the game Minecraft. So, let’s get started by going over some of the recipes you’ll use to make a mine cart track. You’re going to need a whole bunch of wood in the form of sticks and an absolute ton of iron ingots. So hopefully, you’ve been doing some mining. Place your iron ingots in the following pattern and then a stick right in the middle and for every recipe, it affords you 16 rails. Pull those down and let’s build a mine cart.
Place your ingots like so and you have a mine cart. Once you’ve made enough rails, you can get started building a mine cart track but first, it’s important to understand a couple of the rules, a couple of the laws of how mine cart tracks work in Minecraft. To illustrate that, I’ve built some example intersections up here. So I’ll place some tracks like so and when I place a cart track here, it automatically connects as a ramp. Now when I place an intersection in the middle here, you’ll see it connects from south to west. I know this is southwest because I just woke up and if you look in the sky, you can see the sun rising in the east.
That’s the east, that’s the south and west, southwest. If I want these tracks to connect in a different way, I’ll just break this track and the ones next to it. Now it connects from south to east. Also, from north to south, I can get them to connect by breaking that rail and replacing this track. Now, it’s heading from south to north. So let’s head back to the default southwest orientation and show how this intersection works. I’ll place a cart right here, give it a push and naturally, it heads from west to south. Now, if I come from the opposite direction though, from east, you’ll see the cart doesn’t actually head south. Instead, it continues straight. It turns slightly here but its momentum carries it west. You can use this trick to make one-way intersections, so carts coming from the west head south but carts coming from the east will go straight.
Also, if I push this cart from the north, it does the same thing, turns slightly but continues straight towards the south. So, let’s break this intersection and replace it heading straight. Now, this type of intersection is interesting because carts coming from the side will always turn south, like so. Now before, carts coming from the east continued straight towards the west but now, because of this intersection, south. Alternately, from the south, it will go straight to the north and vice versa, from the north straight to south. So, carts at this intersection will always default to heading south.
Let’s say you want to make an intersection where your carts head north for whatever reason. You can override this southwest rule by building an intersection on an incline, like so. So, no matter what direction my cart comes from, they’re going to intersect at this incline that heads north and they’re going to turn in that direction. Turn north and from the west, turn north and ultimately from the south, it will continue straight as well. So, that’s a good way to override this default turn to the south.
So, once you’ve got a good solid grasp of how intersections work in Minecraft, you can actually start building powered rails and make really large mine cart tracks. Let’s do that. The recipe for powered rails are a lot like normal rails but, instead of iron, you use gold. Place them like so, stick in the middle again but this time, red stone. Red stone is the element in Minecraft that gives things power. Place it on the bottom and you get six powered rails for each recipe, not 16. So you’re going to need a lot of gold.
Right off the bat, you’re going to want to build a booster and that will get your mine cart up to speed. Now, the highest speed you can go in Minecraft is eight blocks per second or eight meters per second. To get to that speed, I’m going to place three powered rails in a row. Now, powered rails default to the off position. You need to turn them on by using the red stone torch but when they’re off like this, they actually slow your mine cart down. They will act as brakes. I don’t want that for my booster, so I’m going to turn them on with the red stone torch. The red stone torch is made like a regular torch. It’s a stick on the bottom but instead of coal on top, it’s red stone.
I need to place this next to my powered rails, so I’ll put a block down next to it and then a torch on top of that block and there you go. You can see them light up because they are actually now on. If I plac