Minecart science with powered rail

Experiments demonstrating how powered rail behaves, with side-by-side comparisons to booster carts.

The results:

Booster carts and powered rail are roughly equivalent in all ways but one. Booster carts let you put a large amount of energy into a cart in one place, whereas powered rail gives you diminishing returns when trying to put energy into a cart.

Conclusions:
In most cases, booster carts and powered rail are similar. There's still reasons why you'd want to use one or the other. If you want to keep all your infrastructure in one area, booster carts let you give a mighty push at the start of a line. But booster carts usually have a delay before they start pushing your cart, and powered rail is nearly instant. Also, the only reliable runaway cart detectors I've seen require a booster cart.

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• Minecraft
• redstone
• powered rail
• booster cart
• minecart
• science
• experiment

[California292292]

boosters work again in RC2.... haven't tested in 1.0 yet, i'm about to though

[TaviRider]

@California292292 According to @SethBling they stopped

working just two days later.

[RolanDecoy1]

In 1.8.1 booster no longer work, at least not in SPS. I think they shrunk the width of the carts to a little less than 1 block.

[TaviRider]

@RolanDecoy1 Yeah, it's been a long time since booster carts worked. At the time this video came out, both still worked, and there was a lot of dismay about how much weaker powered rail is compared to booster carts.

[divineagent]

The other real difference is that Booster carts will eventually be fixed, and no longer work.

[TaviRider]

@o0AWAX0o 'cuz I'm old. And everybody's gotta have a tagline, right?

[Devera510]

8 i'm pretty sure is the best distance for powered tracks moving empty carts, you can have it a bit higher to stay at top speed with storage/riden carts tho

[Johnadude3]

try boosted and power rails combined

[skipplet]

You sound like Marc Martel.

[MegaxAAx]

@TaviRider how do i do that?

[TaviRider]

@MegaxAAx I don't know. Is it compatible with 1.8.1? You may want to start over with a clean, un-modded minecraft.jar.