Minecart with Furnace

This feature is exclusive to Java Edition and Legacy Console Edition.

Minecart with Furnace

Rarity tier	Common
Renewable	Yes
Stackable	No
Size	Height: 0.7 blocks Width: 0.98 blocks
Drops	1 Minecart with Furnace
Health points	4HP

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

Crafting

Ingredients	Crafting recipe
Furnace + Minecart

Similarly to other forms of minecart, minecarts with furnaces can be destroyed by attacking them, and doing so drops them as an item. Despite the appearance of the relevant particles, critical hits are not applied to them.

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 use button. It cannot be powered by a dispenser. The fuel is consumed immediately and it starts to move in the same direction the player clicked toward. Pressing use while not holding coal or charcoal plays the hand animation^{[note 1]} and is supposed to turn it to that direction,^[1] but a bug prevents this from happening.^[2] 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 (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 use.

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.

A player can push an unpowered furnace minecart like any other minecart, but other minecarts cannot push it. So for example, placing a new furnace minecart in front of a speeding minecart is to place an immovable object in its path.

Train mechanics

Weakly-shunted 1-cart train, one cart was used only to push the train together and is left behind

Creating a strongly-shunted 1-cart train. The sloped rail must be replaced with a horizontal rail before powering.

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.^[3]

Since the train runs slower on a fully powered track than a normal minecart (~5 m/s compared to 8m/s), a train pulled by an unpowered furnace minecart is ideal for AFK farms involving breaking or placing blocks like nether wart.^[3]

Corralling many minecarts

Unlike other carts, minecart with furnace does not get pushed backward nor forward 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 Tutorial:Minecarts § Moving mobs - minecart with furnace for more details.

Tutorial:Minecart trains brings up multiple use-cases where this gives the player more effective control over a train.

Properties

Fuel is not stored as an item in the entity, but in the object data in the fuel property as a time in ticks. Fuel is a short value, i.e. a maximum of 32767 ticks, which is about 27 minutes. However, /summon furnace_minecart ~ ~ ~ {Fuel:32000} alone doesn't make it go since it doesn't have a direction. It can be right-clicked on a track to give it a direction, or it can be summoned with the properties PushX and PushZ set, which are responsible for the direction. The Motion property of every entity allows for movement of the minecart, but it does not direct the minecart to move on its own.

Sounds

Java Edition:
Minecarts with furnaces use the Friendly Mobs sound category for entity-dependent sound events.^{[sound 1]}

Data values

ID

Java Edition:

Item	Identifier	Form	Translation key
Minecart with Furnace	furnace_minecart	Item	item.minecraft.furnace_minecart

Entity	Identifier	Translation key
Minecart with Furnace	furnace_minecart	entity.minecraft.furnace_minecart

Bedrock Edition (unused):

Item	Identifier	Form	Item ID[i 1]	Translation key
Minecart with Furnace	furnace_minecart	Item	—	item.minecartFurnace.name

Entity	Identifier	Translation key
Minecart with Furnace	furnace_minecart	entity.furnace_minecart.name

Entity data

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

Java Edition:

History

Java Edition

Java Edition Alpha
v1.0.14							Minecarts with furnace were added.
							Since no in-game name was indicated, they were referred to by names such as "powered minecart" or "furnace minecart".
							No matter how much fuel was added to the minecart, it would never move for more than 3 minutes after the last fuel.
Java Edition Beta
1.2							The texture of the minecart with furnace has been changed.
Java Edition
1.0.0			?				Each piece of coal now powers a minecart with furnace for 3 minutes (3600 game ticks), so that adding another piece of coal at any time increases the total range by another 3 minutes. A full stack of 64 coal now powers it for 192 minutes (230400 game ticks).
							Minecarts with furnace on a level track cover 204 meters per minute.
1.3.1			12w15a				Using a minecart with furnace in Creative mode now acts as if the player gave it coal.
1.8			14w11a				Minecarts with furnace now give a much greater boost to other minecarts.
							When powered, minecarts with furnace now move on non-powered rails without decelerating.
			14w17a				Minecarts with furnace's behavior has been reverted, so that no change was released in Java Edition 1.8.
1.14			18w43a				The texture of the minecart with furnace has been changed.
1.15			19w38a				The furnace now appears dark, like suffocating mobs.
			19w39a				The furnace texture is now colored correctly.
1.15.2			pre1				Furnace minecarts can now navigate around any corner.
1.19			22w13a				The crafting recipe for a minecart with furnace is now shapeless.
							Breaking a minecart with furnace now drops the item instead of the minecart and furnace separately.[4]

Legacy Console Edition

Legacy Console Edition
Xbox 360	Xbox One	PS3	PS4	PS Vita	Wii U	Switch
TU1	CU1	1.00	1.00	1.00	Patch 1	1.0.1	Added minecart with furnace.
TU21	CU9	1.14	1.14	1.14			The minecart limit has been increased.
			1.90				The texture of the minecart with furnace has been changed.

Data history

Issues

Issues relating to "Minecart with Furnace" are maintained on the bug tracker. Issues should be reported and viewed there.

Trivia

• The minecart with furnace was excluded from Bedrock Edition on purpose. In a tweet, Jeb considered removing it from Java Edition.^[5]
  • 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.
• In Bedrock Edition, the item texture for Minecart with Furnace can be seen in the game's files despite not being present in-game.

Gallery

Screenshots

• 
  A powered minecart in action.

References