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[ThoMeuhGal]

So I know minecarts are used in various advanced logics mechanisms or as projectiles. But is anybody using them for actually moving stuff around? If so how are you organizing stuff in terms of what are you moving and where, moving raw materials vs moving finished goods etc. What would be the minimal hauling distance for minecarts to be advantageous?

Any link to a game report or videos series  showcasing this would also be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

[Fleeting Frames]

I sometimes do quarry hauling operations, like in Dwarf fortress together: Dedicated serverification in progress.

I also haul in wood in forested areas by drawing in wood from 31x31 wood stockpile, and nesting minecarts full of wood logs inside minecarts; then hauling them all at once next to series of track stop with 1 wheelbarrow trip.

Otherwise, for singular qsps it's generally better to bring 1 good to minecart rather than bring minecart to 1 good and back again, though I suppose industries that generate things in bulk could benefit from it.

[Skorpion]

For rock and ores, DEFINITELY. Useful rocks get hauled to a small wheelbarrow-fed stockpile at the top of the fort, which runs a short way to dump the rocks all the way down a shaft to a quantum stockpile near the forges, tucked away safely behind doors and routing and being nowhere near anything useful. That stockpile then feeds another minecart that drags the rocks a short way to quantum-dump next to the magma forges.
Wood gets hauled in from the depot to the workshops by minecart.
Waste from the butcheries is dumped into a minecart, and thrown into a rubbish pit from there. Possibly to be flooded with magma later. This may also include goblin corpses once I figure out how to work the damn military.

Non-useful rocks just get wheelbarrowed to stockpiles around mason's workshops and craftsdwarf workshops, with special ones for pretty-coloured but otherwise non-useful ones.

[PatrikLundell]

I mainly use mine carts for QS and magma hauling purposes, but occasionally I make a route down a chute to the magma powered facilities connected to a route back up (a spiral impulse ramp driven track wound around the downwards chute). It generally doesn't work very well for me because my fortresses are short on dorf power and mine cart filling has a lower priority than normal hauling, so little actually gets fed into the cart.

[Dragonborn]

I've been wondering how to use minecarts and mine tracks effectively too.  I'm still skeptical that it's more efficient than a large stockpile with a lot of wheelbarrows.

Given that mining out rock consumes the rock, it would seem that minetracks would need to be moved frequently to the next most convenient "quarry" once an area has been cleared and hauled.

Is it really that more efficient when you factor in the time spent setting up track and track stops?  I admit it looks dwarvy to have mine tracks running everywhere with cartloads of rocks and ore, but it doesn't seem very efficient based on my admittedly limited experience using them.

[Fleeting Frames]

Aye, it's mostly minecart qsps.

You can keep harvesting multiple small quarries with 1 cart via rampway and hatches, but indeed from a player viewpoint the least time-consuming option is throwing haulers with wheelbarrows at it; provided you have the haulers; rather than spend hour(s) designing these efficient & automatic quarry contraptions - efficient in the sense of how much and how quickly dwarves labour, not in the sense of how much you labour.


Now, you can get most of the benefit if you don't move the tracks merely due the tracks probably being longer than the hauling distance and carrying 5x the load with fraction of the dwarfpower, but that's not quite as dwarfy.

[ThoMeuhGal]

Thank you all for your answers, and that little guide is very neat thank you

I'm gonna experiment a bit more with this. But I felt like filling the minecarts was a painful and inefficient process. Especially with spread out ressources and moving production sites, which is true for trees and stone/ore.

One thing I wanna try one day is having my fort set up in a way that each industry has its own little independant "village", with dwarves living and eating where they work and minecarts circling around connecting everything. Its certainly not the most optimized thing ever, but I would be happy if I could make it work, possibly on a slightly larger or deeper map.

[PatrikLundell]

If you use "powered" mine carts (as opposed to guided ones) you should make sure to separate mine cart tracks from pedestrian traffic, or you're going to get accidents (Mixing tracks with other traffic is as stupid in DF as it is in real life).

[wuphonsreach]

Powered or even pushed minecarts just aren't that useful when compared to wheelbarrows.  They result in a lot more accidents, run over pets, and take forever to setup (by which point wheelbarrows would have done the job better).

So I only use them for QSPs.  And since QSPs make my forts a lot more compact, I'm not hauling stuff anywhere near as far (just about every workshop / stockpile is within 30-40 steps, including changing Z-levels via stairs).

[Bearskie]

I find trade goods and smaller items to be a better fit for minecarts. Logs and stones, as mentioned, can only fit 5-to-a-cart and have wheelbarrows as an alternative. Refuse is my particular favorite - a cart makes various stops across butcher shop and trap corridors before dumping into the magma sea.

[taptap]

If you use "powered" mine carts (as opposed to guided ones) you should make sure to separate mine cart tracks from pedestrian traffic, or you're going to get accidents (Mixing tracks with other traffic is as stupid in DF as it is in real life).

This really tempts me to build a low velocity mixed traffic system just because...

[bloop_bleep]

If you use "powered" mine carts (as opposed to guided ones) you should make sure to separate mine cart tracks from pedestrian traffic, or you're going to get accidents (Mixing tracks with other traffic is as stupid in DF as it is in real life).

This really tempts me to build a low velocity mixed traffic system just because...

Well, with liberal application of restricted traffic zones, you could create a somewhat safe system for that. You have to micromanage it very carefully though, since if a path over minecart tracks exists that is as little as 23 (restricted traffic cost - normal traffic cost) tiles shorter than the path you intend them to take will cause dwarves to start crossing over the tracks.  It would also be a massive FPS hog since restricted traffic zones can slow down pathing significantly.

[Fleeting Frames]

I imagine they can, depending on the layout, but they're usually save fps by delineating corridors, no?

The mixed traffic setup would be almost completely safe, I think, if using lowest roller speed, as that is what I use for minecart dodge training dwarves can fall asleep in. I prefer my carts to move a bit faster than that, tho :v

[PatrikLundell]

Also, dorfs ignore traffic restrictions when meeting other dorfs to get around them (well, I guess the restrictions are factored in, but they'll still move into the restricted zone). Apart from that, visitors, diplomats, and animals ignore traffic restrictions completely (which is the reason I won't embark in locations where water freezes).
I guess low speed traffic would work if you can keep it low speed, but I'd prefer to separate the traffic (and once you get a diplomat or cat corpse in the system you tend to get additional ones as there are no low cost paths to the corpses for the corpse hauling).

[Fearless Son]

I can think of some particular cases where it might be practical.  For example, if you have magma smelters significantly distant from the bulk of your main excavations (because magma tends to be particular like that unless you have an elaborately !!Fun!! transport system,) it might pay to have a stockpile of ore nearby where you are mining and a mine cart that takes the ore back to the forges (since magma smelters are difficult to relocate.)  Or if you have flux stone in a neighboring biome (but same region) from your fortress, you could strip-mine the whole hillside and use a cart to track the stones back to your fort. 

But in general, unless you are moving magma or doing a Stupid Dwarf Trick, I would stick with wheelbarrows.