Minecarts and Botania

GameGuruGreenGryphon

I've disliked working with minecarts forever. I've tried to enjoy them, but they end up being more work than they're worth.
Minecarts have always been janky, buggy, poorly documented, slow, and just unfun. Their inclusion in Botania as the solution to medium to long-range mana transportation makes me sad.
Anything more robust than a single track and a single minecart with a mana pool gets more complicated than I think fits in the spirit of Botania and doesn't end up looking good compared to the rest of the mod.
Part of that is a skill issue on my part, but I'm here to argue it's not ENTIRELY my fault, and why it doesn't fit with the mod.

Botania has always offered alternative ways to accomplish automation tasks and that only gets more true with time as Mojang mysteriously adds features from Botania. Mending, offhanded tools, the grindstone, automatic crafting, spawnable Shulkers, teleporting back to a set position, and more.
In lieu of doing vanilla Minecraft stuff, Botania provides many utilities that are often simpler and easier to perform, but at the cost of mana. Engaging with Botania's systems and jumping through its hoops allows the player to use more powerful redstone and automation mechanics.
This is NOT true for Minecarts with Mana Pools, the developer-intended way to transport mana beyond short distances.
You have* to interact with vanilla Minecraft's neglected feature, minecarts, to transport mana in bulk, rather than what would be Botania's pretty and magical solution.
There is a single dedicated item, the Spectral Rail, to help facilitate mana minecart setups. Botania's main contribution to mana minecart setups is Pulse Spreaders, Mana Detectors, and Floating Hourglasses to help reduce the complexity of redstone circuitry.
This really feels like it goes against the grain of Botania, but it also just sucks as I really dislike minecarts.

*I just gotta suck it up and use Corporea with Mana Tablets to do good mana transfer without messing with minecarts. Either that or using a dumb amount of Mana Spreaders, which still isn't very good, fun, or nice-looking.

Maybe I just don't understand minecarts, maybe I'm mad because I'm bad, I dunno. I've tried learning minecarts many times across the years, both inside and outside of Botania. It always feels like a slog, which is a shame.
Some suggestions, advice, tutorials, and/or reassurance would help me feel better about this.

williewillus

I'm curious what you think would improve carts, I think they're an underrated and unloved part of vanilla, so if there's improvements that fit with vanilla we could push for their inclusion in Botania or Quark to help out

GameGuruGreenGryphon

Musketeer had many nice opinionated changes, such as cheaper minecart rail recipes and the inclusion of More Minecarts and Rails's Lightspeed Rail. Those only really address minecarts as a mode of transportation and not so much minecarts for logistics.

As for actual logistics... I really don't have much of an idea. Minecarts and redstone do not mix, as minecarts encourage longer distance travel, but information transfer is difficult through redstone alone.
If I had a magic wand, I'd have some train system Create or Factorio uses. Something that isn't sprawling with varied complex items like More Minecarts and Rails and allows easy configuration that isn't entirely defined through its redstone structure.

Bringing it back down to reality, there needs to be an easier way to implement certain minecart logistics "idioms", like T junctions, intersections, loading, and unloading stations. There also needs to be a way to let minecarts share the same track and not be a complete nightmare.

Brainstorming time...
For Quark, simpler mechanics may be appropriate.
All minecarts can be dyed one of 16 colors, applied with a dispenser, crafted, or right-clicked with a dye.
A new rail type is added, the Dyed Rail, coming in 16 colors. It acts like a T junction, with the perpendicular direction being the dyed color. Minecarts passing over it that are dyed the same color take the turn, other minecarts continue forward.
This allows shunting minecart sorting redstone logic to the encoding of the minecart itself, and they can look cool!

I wrote so much of this stuff and then I went to YouTube to look up "minecart loader" and uhhh...
Shit.
I think I'm just bad at redstone.
I've made similar things to this many times before but like... guh.

GameGuruGreenGryphon

I will also post this video here from Gneiss Name: Ideas for fixing minecarts
They should also be faster. Because they're slow beans.
It is very reasonable and helps articulate what I say but like. Mumbo Jumbo owned me.
Fabrication and Forgery offer some nice opinionated configuration options, like turbo fast furnace minecarts, chunk loading furnace minecarts, silent minecarts if the rails are on wool... uhhh...
I'm tired. Posting juice empty.

Wormbo

I think it could be "very Botania" to attach some sort of entity to a minecart (or boat, or really any other entity) that has some sort of information attached to it (e.g. a color) and is detectable by a stationary block for a redstone signal. That could help with routing of minecarts, or boats in water streams. (Not sure how exactly this would work for minecarts that hold a player or mob, as they can only have one passenger. Maybe we instead attach some form of information directly to the cart instead.)

I could also see mana and container carts/boats being able to carry a spark and interact with the usual Botania things the same way as sparked blocks. That would only make sense, given all the possible Sable shenanigans in 1.21+. (Combined with the above idea, the spark would be the color information holder.)

danone__

I was very sad when I found out Minecarts don't get to ride on luminizers. I think it could be a fun and balanced way to transfer mana around.

adarsh

Regarding making minecarts faster (outside of the vanilla experimental changes), could influence lenses potentially boost carts? Maybe even Daffomills? I use Fabrication/Forgery along with Linkart to make Furnace Minecart trains viable, but if they were actually useful in vanilla, Exoflames working on them would be funny, especially if somehow they could siphon mana from passing mana carts.

The minecart dyeing idea is kinda neat. Mana pools can be dyed so I can see a world where you could dye the pool within a minecart, coupled with the detection block Wormbo proposed. I feel like Botania could add functionality to the detector rail (when placed on a dyed block) to achieve this.