I have been spending a lot of time in Minecraft recently. With the new patch to 1.6.4, a lot of people’s minecart systems are broken because they fixed the “bug” where 2 minecarts that are moving beside each other will accelerate, aka: a booster. Our minecart system wasn’t immune either, we had to do an overhaul of all of 3-way intersections and our cart delivery system (CDS). During the overhaul, we decided that we would not use ANY bugs or glitches that might be fixed in future patches, this included cart stacking. I was curious to see what other people did for CDS’s or 3-way intersections, so I looked on YouTube. I was quite surprised to find that all of the 3-way intersections I could find were single-track, and that at least 90% of the CDSs were stack-based. There were some interesting 4-way intersections that were quite compact, but also quite complicated. This got me thinking that I should make some videos for both: my bi-directional 3-way intersection and my 1.6.4 and beyond compatible Cart Delivery System.

I’ll give a quick description of the CDS because let’s be honest, it could take me a while to make a video. This system, as complicated as it may seem, uses very little redstone logic, and that was one of my objectives. There are N cart-bays in a line, spaced 2 apart (cart, space, space, cart), with each cart sitting on an un-powered “powered rail” and facing parallel to each other. One end of the delivery system is used for both the outgoing and incoming carts. When you request a cart, ALL of the carts get boosted and each cart moves over one bay, then stops on the brake using only stationary tracks and powered rails. The cart that was closest to the entrance/exit will be fed out to the user. The exact same thing happens when a cart is re-loaded except that all the carts move away from the entrance/exit to make room for the new cart at the end. Reloading carts requires that a single piece of track per cart-bay gets switched, otherwise the carts will try to leave. I call this a “Shifting Station” because all of the carts shift either toward or away from the entrance/exit. You’ll also notice that there are no gaps the carts, there will always be a contiguous block of carts from the first bay beside the entrance/exit inward. It looks pretty cool when you watch it too, I’ll have to show you.

EDIT: No video, but I did make a detailed page about this.