Fast Player Minecarts

Minecarts go faster while a player is riding them. Nothing else about minecarts changes.

Vanilla caps every minecart at 8 blocks per second, which makes rails a poor way to get anywhere. This mod raises that limit for the cart you are actually sitting in, and leaves every other cart alone so your farms and item transport keep the timing you built them around.

What is affected

Cart	Behaviour
Minecart with a player inside	Faster, 3x by default, so about 24 blocks per second
Empty minecart	Vanilla
Minecart with a mob inside	Vanilla
Chest, hopper, furnace, TNT, spawner and command block minecarts	Vanilla

Hopper and chest carts are never touched. The mod only picks up a plain minecart that has a player as its passenger, and the other cart types are separate classes that can never match that check.

How it works

Instead of raising the speed limit, which makes carts skip rail blocks and fly off corners, the mod runs the cart's movement several times per game tick. Every one of those steps is a normal vanilla step, so rails, curves, slopes, detector rails, activator rails, friction and powered rail boosts all behave exactly as they always did. Your existing tracks and booster spacing keep working. The cart just covers the same ground faster.

That also means a boosted cart still trips detector rails it passes over, and an activator rail still ejects you.

Commands

Operators only, at gamemaster level. Changes apply immediately with no restart and no relog.

• /fastcarts multiplier shows the current multiplier and the resulting top speed.
• /fastcarts multiplier <1-8> sets it. 1 means vanilla, so the boost is off.

The value is saved to config/fastcarts/settings.json and survives restarts. You can also edit that file by hand while the server is stopped.

Installation

Server side only. Put the jar in your server's mods folder along with Fabric API. Players joining with a plain vanilla client get the faster carts too, since nothing is needed on their end. It also works in single player and on LAN worlds.

Things worth knowing

• At higher multipliers the cart looks a little steppier to the rider, because position updates arrive at the normal rate while the cart covers more ground between them. 3 or 4 feels best.
• Minecarts do not load chunks, the rider does. On a long track through fresh terrain, world generation may not keep up at 24 blocks per second.
• Ramming a parked chest or hopper cart can shove it a bit harder than vanilla would in a single tick. It still cannot travel faster than a vanilla cart.
• Worlds with the experimental Minecart Improvements datapack enabled are supported as well.

Source

Source code and an automated test suite that measures real cart speeds are at github.com/DeeKahy/fastcarts. Released under CC0, so do what you like with it.