Create Cart Loot

Open an abandoned mineshaft chest. Sometimes walk out with a working Create drill cart.

Create Cart Loot is a NeoForge loot mod for Create. It does not add new Create machines or recipes. It injects pre-built Create minecart contraptions into chest loot so exploration can hand players a real cart they can place on rails and put to work. By default that only happens in abandoned mineshafts, about one in five chests (20%). The drop is the minecart itself — already assembled as a Create contraption.

How it works for players

When a mapped chest generates loot, NeoForge Global Loot Modifiers may add a cart template on top of the normal table. Shipping defaults are strict: only abandoned mineshaft chests are enabled. Other chest families stay off unless you turn them on in config. What ships in the base mod is one template — a 7×7 drill minecart based on Thecpt’s CreateMod schematic. Place it on your rails, then use Create as usual to move and process what it digs.

That changes early and mid Create play. Mineshaft exploration becomes Create-relevant instead of only a vanilla scrap hunt. Finding the cart feels like a discovery: you can start moving ore the same day without designing your first drill from scratch. Create’s tech tree is still yours to learn — the loot jump-starts the first working cart, not the whole factory.

Config (createcartloot-common.toml, and in-game under Mods if Cloth Config is present) lets you change chances and which chest families can drop carts. Defaults keep the find special: mineshafts on at 20%, everything else off.

How modders use this as a resource

Create Cart Loot is built to be extended. The project ships as two jars on purpose: createcartloot-api and create-cart-loot-core. Core is the survival loot behavior and the default drill template. The API is the integration surface other mods (and serious datapack / pack workflows) use to register their own Create minecart contraptions and decide where those carts appear in the world.

If you design Create cart contraptions — farm carts, processing carts, specialty drills, adventure rewards — you can package them as an addon that depends on the API instead of forking this mod. Your addon registers one or more templates: each template is the serialized cart / contraption data Create needs to recreate that minecart in the world, plus the metadata loot uses (id, display, which chest families or structures it may inject into, and chance). When loot runs, Create Cart Loot’s global loot modifiers look at registered templates and the active config, then inject matching carts the same way the built-in drill is injected.

That means other authors can:

• Ship their own Create minecart contraptions as loot without reimplementing NeoForge GLM wiring.
• Map those carts to specific chest families or exploration content so finding them feels tied to the world.
• Keep player-facing defaults conservative in their own addons while still letting pack makers retune rates.
• Rely on the same place-on-rails workflow players already understand from the base drill cart.

There is also a creative-side convert / export path aimed at authors: build the cart in-game with Create, then capture it into the NBT / template form the API expects so you are not hand-writing contraption data. Survival players do not need that path; it exists so modders and pack authors can turn a working in-world cart into something loot can spawn.

In short: players get occasional Create cart discoveries in the world. Modders get a reusable hook to put their Create minecart contraptions into that same loot pipeline and decide how those carts show up during exploration.

Requirements and credit

Minecraft 1.21.1, NeoForge 21.1.x, Create 6.0.x. Install both the API jar and the core jar. Schematic design credit for the default 7×7 drill: Thecpt / CreateMod. Author credit for this mod: Renzo. License: MIT.