Transportation Guide
Overview
Efficient transportation is vital to success in EarthPol. Whether you're connecting your capital to rural towns or creating a cross-country trade route, good transport systems make your nation feel alive and connected. Rails can help with logistics, trade, and player movement—especially in a world where distance and geography matter. Fast, reliable transport gives players and towns a serious edge in coordination, economics, and defense.
🚄 Rails
Rails is a neat plugin that makes minecart travel fast and practical by introducing a high-speed rail system. With this plugin, minecarts can travel up to 4x faster than vanilla powered rails, reaching speeds of 32 m/s (115 km/h)—comparable to rocket elytra flight.
Example of a high-speed rail in action
🔧 How it Works
Boost Blocks: Place a powered rail on a boost block (redstone block) to create a high-speed rail.
Regular Behavior: Placing a powered rail on any other block creates a normal powered rail.
Example of a national rail layout
You can use the command /cart on any rail, and you will automatically be placed into a minecart! The minecart will disappear after you exit or if it gets destroyed.
⚙️ Design Tips for High-Speed Tracks
Because Minecraft wasn't originally built for this kind of speed, derailing can occur unless your tracks are well-designed:
- Avoid sharp turns and steep slopes – Use bridges or tunnels to maintain flat routes.
- Accelerate gradually – Place multiple high-speed rails at the start.
- Place regular rails before turns/slopes to slow down.
- Resume high-speed rails after turns/slopes to regain speed.
⛵ Ice Roads
Boat ice roads are another extremely fast option for travel, offering 40 m/s for roads with packed ice and up to 72 m/s with blue ice. Build ice roads easily using our custom recipes for ice, which significantly reduce the amount of ice required to craft blue and packed ice. Use efficient ice road designs to make every ice block count and stretch your roads further!
Stand on any ice block and run the /boat command to automatically be placed into a boat. The boat will disappear after you exit or if it gets destroyed.
Example of an ice road in Nether.