Rev 24 Rails

[barneygale]

Rail building is dying down a bit in the current rev so I thought it might be useful to reflect on the rail infrastructure in rev 23 and share some ideas for the next revision.

Things that work well:

• Getting your rail connected to the greater PVE rail system is very accessible, both in terms of the skills you need and the resources. Previous PVE revs had very complex rail systems which were a little inhibiting.
• Item frame stations are compact and easy to build
• In my experience, everyone has been very accommodating when it comes to connecting up or making pragmatic edits

Things that could be better:

• There's a lot of duplicate/parallel rails that take basically the same route but make different stops. I think these resources would be better used connecting up towns/cities that have no rail links, rather than building 'express routes'
• The rail station (and portal) at spawn are too hard to find for new players. Not super hard, but still too hard.
• Interchange between portals and rails is a little confusing in a couple places
• Almost all rail lines (even fancy resource-intensive ones) are underground!

So, a few thoughts and possible points of discussion:

• I'm sure everyone is sick of hearing this, but I'd love to see a super-simple spawn with really obvious food, portals and rails. The staff can always build huge/crazy stuff away from spawn ?
• We should favour connecting new settlements, even if you have to make multiple stops, over building express lines parallel to existing lines.
• Spawn probably has too many possible destinations (32) that promotes parallel lines and discourages hub culture. I think this could be reduced to 16 or even 8.
• I'd love to collaborate with other rail builders on an above-ground network, especially an overground ring.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the topic of rails.

Cheers

[robr]

one of the biggest advantages about rails is the ability to afk on them - if i have to constantly pay attention to continue down the line, i may as well take horse or elytra... it'd be one thing if a group of builders built something along the lines of TRAVEL or DEEP from several revs back that used redstone to continue users down the line automatically after X amount of time, but most won't, not to mention the difficulty in policing what's grief vs. what's a legitimate connection..

 

really, map size is a big limiter for rail development because all the settlements are too spread out, rail to anywhere is a significant investment in time

[barneygale]

I'll dig up some info on TRAVEL and DEEP, but I'm a pretty casual player so if it's the sort of thing that involves pistons every x blocks I find it hard to get excited. I'd hope that with a well-designed rail network you can get almost anywhere with 2 changes of fewer, and as long as the rails and stations are safe you can still do a bunch of AFK travel (its pretty much the reason I prefer rails). Even so I'll check it out!

[DjentleGiant]

On 4/22/2019 at 4:23 PM, robr said:

...DEEP...

Don't you mean DWEEB, a.k.a. Djentle's Worldwide Expeditious and Efficacious Bullet-train?

[robr]

actually i was thinking of WHEAT(

, not DEEPs - but yeah, DWEEB also had a similar system and i used it along an alias line to the nether portal in rev21 too ...  barney, basically it's a stop with a redstone clock activate when a user comes near into the station, plays a little ditty and then automatically reactivates the rail and moves them along if they don't get out or provide any direct input - no pistons or advanced bit storage involved - redstone only at the individual stations themselves..

[barneygale]

Cool that sounds very doable! Did previous revs have pre-built spawn stations or is that new for rev 23?

[buzzie71]

The last few revs have had pre-built spawn stations (21-23, though 21's was near spawn outside rather than inside).  There's been a long stretch of P revs where a staff-made pre-built station had been absent from in or near spawn (rev 12 to 20 I think).  In those revs there tended to be a player-built station near spawn to fill the niche.

Edited April 29, 2019 by buzzie71