Minecart with Furnace

A minecart with furnace is a furnace inside a minecart. It can be powered with exclusively coal or charcoal to propel it across a rail line for a limited time, which can be used to move other minecarts.

Obtaining

Minecarts with furnace can be retrieved by attacking them, and by doing so they drop as an item. Critical hits are not applied to them, although the particles suggest otherwise.

Usage

Minecarts with furnaces are placed in the same way as other minecarts. They do not have a GUI, unlike a furnace. Also unlike a furnace, furnace minecarts can only be powered with coal and charcoal. Other fuel sources, such as blocks of coal or blaze rods, cannot be used. Minecarts with furnaces can be powered, done by feeding fuel into the furnace minecart with the button. The fuel is consumed immediately and it starts to move in the same direction the player clicked toward. Pressing while not holding coal or charcoal plays the hand animation and is supposed to turn it to that direction, but a bug prevents this from happening. Adding fuel increases the duration by an additional 3600 ticks (equal to 180 seconds or 3 minutes). The upper limit is 32767 ticks, approximately 27 minutes. When powered, minecarts with furnaces cover 240m per minute (about 4 m/s, slightly slower than walking speed) or 720m per piece of fuel. They do not accelerate beyond this speed when going downhill or on active powered rails, and as long as they remain powered, they do not slow down when going uphill, on inactive powered rails, or when pushing or pulling other minecarts. If a powered furnace minecart is derailed and then pushed back onto a rail, it starts moving again in the direction it came from, so they are not easily turned around in this state unless a player is nearby to redirect it with . When a minecart with furnace bumps into another minecart or multiple minecarts, the other minecarts are pushed forward with great speed. The furnace minecart continues on with its own speed. Because of this speed difference, some of the minecarts may end up inside unloaded chunks on straight tracks.

Train mechanics

A furnace minecart can be made to pull up to four other minecarts. All minecarts in this train move at the constant speed of the furnace minecart. Trains are formed when a minecart is pushed into the back of a powered furnace minecart or a short-enough train. These shunts are fragile at best and easily come undone, but some methods are stronger than others. For example, pushing a minecart into a furnace minecart and then powering the furnace gives a weaker shunt than pushing the furnace minecart into the other minecart against a wall, and then powering the furnace in the other direction. Minecarts with furnaces can climb up steep inclines while pushing other minecarts as long as they have fuel. If a minecart with furnace reaches a slope while pulling another minecart, the pulled minecart is switched to the forward position so that it can be pushed along the slope instead of pulled. A high-speed minecart running into the back of a furnace minecart going in the same direction automatically creates a weak shunt with it, pulling it along. Pulling a minecart with TNT causes it to explode. When a train comes to a turn, the shunt comes undone with the pulled minecart jettisoned backward. The correct way to make such a turn is having the shunt undone before a turn, and then make the two rejoin on a straight rail later by having the pulled cart catch up with the minecart with furnace.

Pushing mobs

Unlike other carts, minecart with furnace does not get pushed backwards or forwards because of any collision mechanics. This means they can be useful to move longer "trains" of carts forward, even in conjunction with powered rails. See for more details

Entity data

Minecarts with furnace have entity data associated with them that contain various properties of the entity. :

: The number of ticks until the minecart runs out of fuel. : Force along X axis, used for smooth acceleration/deceleration. : Force along Z axis, used for smooth acceleration/deceleration.

Trivia

The minecart with furnace was excluded from on purpose. In a tweet, Jeb considered removing it from . When converting a Legacy Console Edition world to a Bedrock Edition world, any present minecarts with furnaces are converted into a normal minecart. Despite the above-described poor standing of the minecart, it was most recently briefly featured in an animation in the Minecraft Live 2022, where one was depicted as moving a train of about 20 minecarts at a higher than normal speed.