Minecart Booster Basics

Today's post will explore the basics of minecarts. And those basics can be summed up in one sentence: Minecarts slide along Minecart Rails.

There! Honestly, there's not much to learn about the basics of minecarts that anyone with a working knowledge of everyday physics wouldn't already know. Carts roll downhill, carts don't roll uphill that well, hitting things will slow you down or stop you.

Now that we're done with the basics, on to the intermediates!

The intermediate skills of minecart crafting depends heavily upon understanding and employing one glitch in particular that allows a minecart to gain a great amount of momentum. This glitch occurs when a minecart travels down a slope onto a flat plane that has another minecart next to it. The minecarts latch onto each other and effectively "boost" each other's momentum infinitely. The momentum gained by both minecarts is enough to push them for dozens of blocks. Any structure that allows this glitch to occur is called a "minecart booster".

There are many types of minecart boosters, which are categorized by their shape (flat vs sloping) and their properties (powered vs unpowered, resetting vs non-resetting). The booster I'll be demonstrating in this post is the simplest one to make: The flat non-resetting booster. The steps to making a minecart booster are as follows.

1.Find a nice place to build your rail and your booster. You will need to be able to dig downward at this place.

What a nice empty place! Time for some building!

2. Build a track that slopes into a lower elevation. Your booster will be located at this lower elevation.

3. Build another track next to your first track at the lowered elevation. This will be the boosting track. Have this track be at least 4 blocks long. MAKE SURE THAT THE BOOSTING TRACK'S FIRST RAIL IS NEXT TO THE TRAVELING TRACK'S SLOPE.

4.  Make sure the booster track has a block at the end and beginning so that your booster cart doesn't roll off anywhere! If you build your booster in a pit of lowered ground, like I'm doing, you probably won't need to worry about that.

5. Set your boosting minecart so that it is at the very end of the boosting track. If you did this correctly, your boosting minecart should be right next to the traveling rail's slope.

Go make yourself a sandwich. Your booster is made! Now you have what is known as a non-resetting minecart booster! Make sure your booster cart is at the slope closer to where your traveling minecart is coming from, and take it for a ride.

To see an example of a minecart booster in action, as well as what is by far the best minecart booster tutorial I've ever seen, go here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPls6LXlkGI