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[khearn]

'Guide' is like walking around the shops with a shopping trolley
'Ride' is like pushing off a bobsled and getting in it
'Push' is like pushing off a bobsled and waving it goodbye

Excellent way to describe it.

[Sutremaine]

Apart from being a less management-intensive replacement for the 'dump to garbage zone over drop to quantum stockpile' method of getting things where you want them, minecarts can be used to connect areas that you wanted to be close together in the first place. One industry can have its in/out stockpiles and associated workshop next to another industry that uses the products of the first, but unless you spend a lot of time planning something is going to end up with extra walking distance. I've always found this particularly noticeable with the cloth industry. To get every cloth-related workshop and its raw materials and output in one tight bundle is relatively simple, but most of the workshops used in the cloth industry are used by other industries.

With minecarts, you can stop trying to plan your fortress like a Rubik's cube. If Industry D is spread around the fortress because Industries A, B, and C took all the closest spaces to each other, it doesn't matter because you can use minecarts to cut down on the number of trips needed to shift the stuff that Industry D uses. Going further, those three industries don't need to be close to each other any more. If you can pin down the one or two kinds of item most commonly shared between industries, you can make a hauling network for those and keep short-distance intra-industry hauling jobs manual.

I expect minecarts to be of most help when dealing with milling. You still can't specify what you want to mill and the industries associated with each type of mill product are extensive sprawls (I'm ignoring the seed hauling because it traumatises me), so being able to send flour and dye off to their appropriate sections of the fortress without having to have a dwarf for every trip will allow for some breathing room in fortress design.

[k9wazere]

I asked myself the same question. Why use minecarts? As yet I've not experimented with them.

However, here are some (very quickly formed) ideas on how they could be made more important/mandatory:

(some of these ideas are "gamey" for the sake of it, rather than attempting to be realistic)

a. some stones/ores simply cannot be hauled or carted in wheelbarrows. justification? too heavy; too dangerous/toxic; insert reason here. minecarts become essential for hauling.

b. dwarves refuse to haul heavy loads over long distances/get unhappy thoughts from it (Urist McHauler has complained of a bad back recently).

c. dwaves hauling manually prone to injuries requiring hospital treatment (bad back, accidents)

d. dwaves hauling manually get tired more quickly/ sleep more often/ take longer breaks/ consume more booze/ something else.

Those are just some vague ideas to start with

[dennislp3]

I tend to play with all wood piles and related industries in one area, ore and industries in another (separated by stone and ore) etc. Mine carts allow me to ship around intermediate and finished goods with much more ease and time saved than having to worry about how to bundle everything perfectly together without people having to walk all over for stuff. I also tend to build more horizontally and on the surface.

[N35t0r]

My problem with mineral/ore minecarts is that I set up a small stockpile at the railhead to fill up the minecart, and dwarves travel to the other end of the fortress to get stuff, when a perfectly good alternative is just three tiles away. I'd like to be able to limit the catchment area of stockpiles, or at least have dwarves pick the closest mineral/ore.

[Sutremaine]

Idea: set railhead stockpile to be link-only. Create link-only stockpile over mined area. Link those two stockpiles together.

[N35t0r]

That's... really ingenious, if it works.

[King Mir]

In my fort I have various industries connected by minecarts. For instance, my smelters create nickel. This gets hauled up to the decoration floor to be studded on something. The stonecrafter also sends his product to the decoration floor. Then the forge on the decoration floor takes from both the nickel and stone crafts, studs them with nickel, and outputs to a 3rd stockpile on the same floor. That stockpile sends the goods up to the trade depot.

I'm planning to have a drop-to-bottom minecart arrangements for ore, rock, and maybe more. They are in progress.

Minecarts are great at bringing materials together from far off places. I wish I could find a way to use them to distribute materials in the other direction. Specifically, for construction it would be nice to have a small block stockpile on every floor. But although stockpiles will split evenly between the stockpiles they're linked to, mine-carts don't. Maybe it would be possible to make mine-carts spill a few blocks at a time by making them go at high velocity? 

[Rakushun]

In my fort I have various industries connected by minecarts. For instance, my smelters create nickel. This gets hauled up to the decoration floor to be studded on something. The stonecrafter also sends his product to the decoration floor. Then the forge on the decoration floor takes from both the nickel and stone crafts, studs them with nickel, and outputs to a 3rd stockpile on the same floor. That stockpile sends the goods up to the trade depot.

I'm planning to have a drop-to-bottom minecart arrangements for ore, rock, and maybe more. They are in progress.

Minecarts are great at bringing materials together from far off places. I wish I could find a way to use them to distribute materials in the other direction. Specifically, for construction it would be nice to have a small block stockpile on every floor. But although stockpiles will split evenly between the stockpiles they're linked to, mine-carts don't. Maybe it would be possible to make mine-carts spill a few blocks at a time by making them go at high velocity?

You could always configure the stops so the minecart continues along the route when it's a certain percent full. If you have ten stops, you have the minecart move on from the first stop immediately when 90% full, the second when 80% full and so on, until the last stop at empty. So 100/X where X is number of stops, that's how much you subtract from 100% on each stop. You can't just have the cart dump then, but do you really expect dwarves to set up a system where a minecart dumps precise quantities of things automatically?

[N35t0r]

I'm anxiously expecting signals, switches, and some more functionality for minecarts to set up a full transport network.

[clem131]

After trying it a bit, I'm still unconvinced: I have the following setup:
3 sets of tracks, each leading to a pit; they chain together to bring ore, clay and sand to the magma workshops area. The intermediate minecart tracks drop directly on stockpiles which are right next to and linked to the start of the next track.

- Metalsmiths travel all the way to the second level below surface, grab chalk, then head down to make steel. There is a stockpile full of limestone, chalk etc like 10 steps from the smelters. So, not useful for steel making.
- Loading items from the stockpile to the cart is not a "chained job": a dwarf travels to the stockpile, picks up one single object, loads it and then goes away. This pretty much nullifies the advantage of having the cart track, because the time saved by moving 5 pieces of ore + dropping them in the pit is lost to time spent by dwarves travelling from the surface to the second or third cart track just to load a piece of clay. In the meantime, the other dwarves play choo choo train with wheelbarrows, picking up stuff from the minecart stockpile and happily (and more efficiently) hauling it where it belongs.
(I built a room + dining room stocked with food next to the carts and burrowed a peasant in each. They sat idle all the time, while other dwarves descended 10000 km to load the cart)
- Even with a system of hatches, occasionally a dwarf is crushed by the falling ore.
- For some reason the dwarves won't stockpile sand bags, so glassmakers travel from magma to surface to retrieve their bags which basically means the glass industry is too slow to be useful. This is why I started the cart system in the first place, but since stockpiles don't work, they won't load them into cart either.
This implementation feels like a good start, but there's still a lot of room for improvement, imo.

[Laserhead]

I find minecarts are useful right away, for bringing stuff into the fort.

I like to embark with just an anvil, some ore, some coal, a few fire safe stones, some plump helmets, and maybe a bit of leather or a few logs. I don't actually start digging until the surface industry has been working for a bit, so running a track from the wagon area to my first underground area saves a lot of hauling once I've got it dug out.

The track is still useful for bringing in wood afterwards.

Hmm, that's got me thinking, if I built a one level tower beside where a cart was parked and dumped water from there, would it fill up the minecart with water? Sort of like a train at a water tower? That'd be handy for bringing water in from a surface source...

[DTF]

- For some reason the dwarves won't stockpile sand bags,

You did realize that sand bags now are found inside the 'Type' category of Furniture, instead of being toggled with "u: sand bags"? Now we only need to enable that for gypsum plaster as well...

[clem131]

- For some reason the dwarves won't stockpile sand bags,

You did realize that sand bags now are found inside the 'Type' category of Furniture, instead of being toggled with "u: sand bags"? Now we only need to enable that for gypsum plaster as well...

Yes, that's how I set up the stockpiles for sandbags, right next to the collection area, where the cart starts from: [p], [t] and then selecting that entry under Furniture.

[Snaake]

- Metalsmiths travel all the way to the second level below surface, grab chalk, then head down to make steel. There is a stockpile full of limestone, chalk etc like 10 steps from the smelters. So, not useful for steel making.

- have the flux and ore stockpile at the bottom give to the smelters (and maybe 1 smelter where you only melt items which doesn't take from either stockpile, which seems like a good idea anyway, due to the fractions of bars thing). There should be a way of setting it up right, you just haven't done so. This is totally unrelated to whether you're using minecarts or not.

I think there may be (at least recall having some trouble with it) some issues with the stockpile in the square the cart dumps to (also applies to bottom of chute, I guess), namely that the game doesn't necessarily recognize stuff dumped there as being in the stockpile. I thought it was resolved though. In any case, with a multi-z-level minecart dump chute, I'd probably go for the locked doors+pressure plates+fall-speed-braking intermediate hatches to avoid/lessen the fatality of head injuries, assuming falling distance/speed have any effect on the level of the injury...

On that though, would helmets reduce falling damage from items? In Nethack, a hard helmet could be pretty important for this purpose. It would be good training for your armorcrafter, just put the smelterhaulers in a squad and give them a uniform with copper helms. The problem with this is that until burrows can be set to "only these dwarves", you'll get haulers from elsewhere going in there as well. Unless of course you do as someone claimed to have done: magma industries as a completely isolated fort complete with magnificent dining and sleeping quarters. Food, booze, ore, etc. delivered via minecarts, magma industry endproducts sent out via powered minecarts.