How to Use Minecarts in Minecraft

Want to travel around the world of Minecraft or create a theme park for your friends to enjoy? Then, minecarts is the answer. In a separate guide, we’ve already covered how you can make minecarts in Minecraft, and in this one, we will cover how you can use them. Minecarts are not a popular means of transport in-game but can be extremely useful in certain situations. So, without further ado, let’s jump in!

1. Use Minecart for Transportation

First of all, you will need to place the minecart in your world to use it. Unlike most other blocks and entities, this requires a bit of preparation. You can place minecarts only on top of rails in Minecraft. They are non-solid blocks that can be crafted with a few ingredients.

Moreover, there are 4 rail variants in the game, including regular rails, powered rails, activator rails, and detector rails. You can place minecarts on top of any rail type, but for the most part, it is better to stick to regular rails.

Once you place the minecart down, you can enter it by right-clicking it. You will then appear inside it and be able to ride it (roller coaster vibes). If the minecart is not moving, you can hold down the forward button to move, though, this will be quite slow.

To speed up minecarts, you can place activated powered rails a few blocks apart on your track. They will provide the minecart with a speed boost, as shown above. Alternatively, you can build this rail track on a downward slope and the minecart will pick up speed as it’s descending the track.

If the minecart reaches the end of the track, it can get derailed. Then, you can push it onto the track again or push it wherever you want it to be. Once you do that, you’ll see that a derailed minecart behaves quite strangely and you also cannot control it anymore. To exit the minecart, you can press the “sneak” key, which is “Shift” by default on PC.

To place a mob inside the minecart, you’ll need to make their hitboxes overlap. You can try pushing or luring the mob towards the minecart until they are interacting, but this may not work every time. One of the most reliable ways of placing a mob in the minecart is when the cart moves over a curved rail track. At this spot, nudge or lure the mob towards the minecart and they should end up inside it.

Minecraft mobs like iron golem (Java Edition only), Ender Dragon, wither, and the warden cannot get inside minecarts, but all other mobs can. To get the mob out of the minecart, you can break the minecart or let it go over a powered activator rail. If this happens, the player or the mob inside the minecart will get ejected automatically.

2. Craft Minecraft Variants

The regular minecart is a part of the crafting recipe for certain special minecart variants. They are entities as well that cannot carry mobs or players but hold some blocks. These variants are hopper minecarts, chest minecarts, TNT minecarts, and furnace minecarts.

Hopper minecarts can pick up items much faster than regular hoppers and also do that through full solid blocks. Chest minecarts have an inventory space equal to a single chest. TNT minecarts can create massive explosions upon collision. Furnace minecart acts like a locomotive and starts moving quickly after you right-click it with fuel, like coal.

So, that’s all you need to know about using minecarts in Minecraft. As you can assume, there are a ton of possibilities with these little entities, from simple chair designs in Minecraft house‘s kitchen to insane rollercoaster rides. What do you use minecarts for the most? Do tell us in the comments below!