Tutorial:Transportation methods
Transporting items, mobs, and yourself long distances is an important but tiresome task. Thankfully, there are many ways to make the trips easier and faster.
Nether
[edit | edit source]Using the Nether is a no-brainer for long-distance travel in the Overworld, as 1 block travelled in the Nether equals 8 blocks travelled in the Overworld. However, it takes 4 seconds to travel through a Nether portal, and a bit more time for the loading to finish, meaning that Nether travel adds 8 seconds to your travel time in exchange for reducing the distance needed to reach the destination by 8 times.
Player transport
[edit | edit source]Walking or running everywhere are viable options, but you may want a faster or smoother option, possibly with added storage benefits. Below are options for transporting player(s) in order of the effort required to construct them.
Horses
[edit | edit source]Horses can be found in plains and savanna biomes, and can be tamed by mounting them until they produce heart particles. A saddle is required in order to control the horse, and it can be equipped with tiered horse armor (Both saddles and horse armor are found in various generated structures). Horses have variable colors and stats, with running speed, jump height, and health all being randomized for each wild horse. A horse that spawns with high stats in all categories makes a useful, tough mount for traversing rough terrain.
Donkeys uncommonly spawn under the same conditions as horses, with the unique ability to be equipped with chests instead of horse armor. This allows for early game, 15-slot mobile storage. However, donkeys spawn with less desirable maximum stats than horses. Fortunately, donkeys and horses can be bred to produce mules, which share the chest ability of donkeys with stats more resembling horses.
Llamas
[edit | edit source]Llamas, which spawn in mountains and savannahs, are notable for their ability to form a caravan if a llama is being lead by the player. However, since llamas cannot be controlled when mounted by any means, they serve better as item transportation in singleplayer (As they can be equipped with chests, with the amount they can carry being a randomly generated stat). However, if the player is playing with other users, they could ride on the llamas while one player leads.
Elytra
[edit | edit source]The Elytra are late-game items found in the End that can be equipped in the chest piece slot. While falling, the player can double-tap the jump button to activate the elytra, allowing the player to gradually glide long distances. This by itself is a powerful transportation method, but the player can enhance their flying with the use of firework rockets to propel themselves in any direction, allowing for extended flight time. However, the player must take note of the elytra's durability, which gradually decreases while flying (The Unbreaking enchantment can be added to slow this effect, and Mending can be added to exchange gathered XP for durability). Phantom membranes can be used to repair elytra in an anvil if necessary. Having a sustainable amount of firework rockets is also fairly expensive if the player does not have a mob farm to easily produce gunpowder. There is also the possibility of the player dying of fall damage if the elytra's durability runs out, or from smacking into a surface at high speeds.
Cannon
[edit | edit source]Extremely high speeds can be reached in a very short amount of time by using propellants such as the push[Java Edition only] from boats, the death of wind charged mobs, or the explosion of wind charges to propel a gliding player.
Minecarts
[edit | edit source]Minecarts allow the player to be transported along rails with no input from the player, with the downside of having to create rail systems to any desired destinations. It can also be quite expensive to create longer rail lines, especially if powered rails are being used. See here for minecart-related redstone contraptions to automate launching, create minecart dispensers, and more.
Dolphin Tunnel
[edit | edit source]It is also possible to make a 1 x 1 tunnel of water with soul soil on the bottom. With respiration on your helmet, depth strider and soul speed on your boots, with Dolphin's Grace, it is possible to travel at speeds of 96m/s. Slower than ice boat highways (top speed of 581.84m/s when the nether is accounted for), but require no acceleration.
Boats
[edit | edit source]Boats travel at 8 b/s in water, which is faster than sprint-jumping. They are also very cheap and don't consume hunger.
On ice
[edit | edit source]Surprisingly, one of the fastest transportation methods in the game involves a boat on solid ground. When boats are on any variant of ice, they can be controlled as easily as if they were in water, and can travel at immense speeds thanks to the slippery nature of the ice. The speed of the boat can also be adjusted depending on which variant of ice is used; normal ice is the slowest, with packed ice being in the middle, and blue ice being the fastest option. However, boats need to travel thousands of blocks to accelerate to their maximum speed. This is possibly the most resource and time demanding method in the game, as the player needs huge amounts of ice, blocks to keep the boat on track, and other materials if the player chooses to decorate the track or spawn-proof it, and ice boat highways in the Nether span 2,000 blocks on average. Additionally, colliding with mobs can be a considerable hazard, especially hostile ones.
Cannon
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Given how boats have no air resistance on Bedrock Edition, boat cannons are the best long-distance transportation method. While the video shows the usage of wind charges to propel the boat, a similar feat can be achieved via the Wind Charged effect, which has the advantage of being far cheaper, given how splash potions can affect an unlimited amount of mobs, and how a large amount of mobs can be fairly swiftly amassed using chicken farms or silverfish farms.
Item transport
[edit | edit source]Transporting items is essential for players who have advanced to the point of having more items than they know what to do with, whether it is for moving items around your base autonomously or moving items across vast distances.
Long range
[edit | edit source]These options are better for moving items across long distances, such as from one home to another.
Donkeys, mules, and llamas
[edit | edit source]As mentioned above, these mobs work well as player/item transport combos. They usually have small inventory spaces, as they are early game options. With leads, many of these mobs can be moved at once, although it can be frustrating with the fragility of leads and rough terrain.
These are an autonomous, simple, and relatively fast (8 blocks per second) method of item transportation.
Ender chests
[edit | edit source]An ender chest is a variant of chest obtained with 8 obsidian and an eye of ender, with the unique ability to share its inventory with all ender chests across the world (specific to each player). It can be used as a "bank vault" of sorts where all of your most important items are kept, as its contents are completely safe from being stolen. Alternatively, it can be used to deposit items from one location and have those items be immediately accessible from any distance in another ender chest. Furthermore, if a silk touch pick is kept on hand, the ender chest can be picked up freely (otherwise, 8 obsidian minus the eye of ender is dropped), allowing for a makeshift extra inventory to carry around.
Shulker boxes
[edit | edit source]End-game items that can be crafted from 2 shulker shells and a chest, these boxes allow for the most efficient storage in the game. The size of a single chest, each box retains its contents when broken, allowing for a backpack of sorts. While shulker boxes cannot be placed inside other shulker boxes, just a few shulker boxes in a player's inventory can allow for a small storage room's worth of items to be in the player's hands at any given moment. They can additionally be dyed and named to create catalogs of what items they contain.
Note that shulker boxes can be put inside ender chests, meaning by combining the carry-on ender chest's inventory space with the player's inventory (excluding the hotbar) to fill with shulker boxes, the player would have a total of 1458 inventory spaces for carrying items.
Short range
[edit | edit source]These options are better for moving items across short distances, such as from an input chest into a storage system.
Hopper lines
[edit | edit source]A chain of hoppers is the simplest method, however the 5 iron per hopper makes it become very expensive very quickly, even with an iron farm.
Water pipes
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A basic water pipe section. Only the ice on top of the button is required. The ice can be upgraded to packed or even blue ice.Water pipes are the second simplest method, and are faster and cheaper than hopper lines, however since the items are transported as entities, they will despawn after spending 5 minutes traveling.
Short-range systems
[edit | edit source]These methods of item transport are best used in transporting items around small areas, such as transporting item drops from a mob farm into adjacent chests.
Water channels
[edit | edit source]By using water source blocks, players can create an item transporting channel that serves as an early game transport system. Combined with soul sand bubble columns, which lift items to higher levels, and magma bubble columns, which pull items down, water channels provide efficient transport. They can additionally be outfitted with ice tracks to make the items move even faster, although this adds to the cost of the system.
Hoppers
[edit | edit source]Hoppers are essentially item pipes that move items within them into the container it is pointing to. This can include other hoppers, allowing for hopper chains that can transport items quickly. The hoppers can also lead into chests, barrels, dispensers, and more to funnel items into storage rooms or to fuel redstone contraptions. This is a more pricey, slower, and less versatile system than water channels, with the prime downside being their inability to transport items upward (only to the side or downward). Therefore, hoppers are better used sparingly, only to take items from one container to another or from a water channel into a container.
Villager and mob transport
[edit | edit source]The player can transport villagers and other mobs to new locations (for the purpose of starting new villages or baiting mob traps) using a variety of techniques:
- Minecart: The player builds a minecart track from the village to the destination, then pushes a villager into the cart and pushes the cart to the destination.
- Water path: The player creates a tunnel or walled path with no exits along the way, and then with two water buckets, uses water to push villagers down the path a few blocks at a time, using the empty bucket to retrieve the water block furthest back. A soul sand bubble column can be used to move villagers upward. Alternatively, if the tunnel is flat, one may use an open fence gate or sign above an ice block adjacent to each last flowing water block to prevent the other adjacent water (source block) to flow backward, therefore creating a cheap "railway".
- Boat: A simple way to transport a single villager over ground is to push one into a boat and then drive the boat, which can be rowed (albeit slowly) over land. A boat can move upward by using a piston in the ground or creating an upward bubble column. The player can also drive the boat up to the step, place a second boat on the step, break the first boat (without hitting the villager) to cause the villager to move to the second boat. A boat can be pulled and even go uphill using a lead. It is possible to fly with an elytra and pull a boat with mobs in it.
- Job blocks/beds: To move a single unemployed villager, the player can place down a job site block and have the villager claim it. Continuously break and place the job site block, luring the villager to where you want it to go. At night, you can do this with beds, but it is dangerous because mobs, especially zombies, can spawn. Alternatively, to move a whole village at once, one can break all beds, job site blocks, and the village bell, and continually place them down like above. It is best to avoid dirt paths when traversing in villages, as they have a slightly lower hitbox then regular blocks and may cause your boat to get stuck.
- Nether portal: If portals have not already been constructed in the Nether, then the player can create a portal at the Overworld destination, travel into the nether and back out again immediately, then build another portal in a village less than 128 blocks from the first portal. After pushing villagers into the village portal (manually or by minecart), then pushing them back out again, letting them "cool down" for 30 seconds, and pushing them back in, the villagers should exit from the first portal.[verify]
- Happy ghast: this method is extremely slow, but may be the most efficent way to move large animals over long stretches of water or rough terrain. Simply leash the animal to the ghast and fly it where you want to go.
