Drill Cart

A craftable, coal-powered tunnel boring machine for vanilla Minecraft. Climb in, feed it coal, and drive it into a mountain — it chews a clean 4×4 tunnel at any angle and sweeps everything it mines into the chests on its back.

Pure data pack. No mods, no resource pack, no client install. Drop it into a server, a Realm or a single-player world and craft it.

What it does

• Drives. W forward, S reverse, A/D to turn — a full 360°, not rails. About 5 blocks/second in the open, a touch quicker than walking.
• Bores. Drive into terrain with the engine running and the drill grinds in, then cuts a 4-wide, 4-tall tunnel and keeps going. Diagonals and curves included — you can steer mid-tunnel.
• Collects. Mined blocks drop and are pulled into the cart's storage a moment later. Ore XP floats to the driver. When storage is full, red text appears over the cart and drops stay on the ground.
• Upgrades. Spend copper, iron and diamonds to add storage rows and slow the wear. 27 → 53 slots.
• Wears out. Durability ticks down while the engine runs, shown over the cart. Repair it with iron ingots, or watch it explode at 0% and spill its cargo on the floor.
• Headlights. Real ones — the cart lights the ground ahead of it and the beam follows it around corners. No night vision, no washed-out cave.
• Hits hard. Anything in front of the drill takes an iron sword's worth of damage and gets thrown forward out of the tunnel.
• Packs up. Sneak-punch it and you get the item back with its level, durability, fuel and cargo intact.

Crafting

Iron Block | Diamond Pickaxe | Iron Block
  Piston   |  Blast Furnace  |   Chest
Iron Block |     Minecart    | Iron Block

The recipe unlocks in the recipe book once you pick up an iron block. Hold the Drill Cart and right-click to place it; it appears a few blocks ahead, facing the way you look.

Controls

Upgrades

Durability only drains while the engine is actually running, so a Level 1 cart gets two minutes of digging per full charge and a Level 4 cart gets ten. Repair costs 1 iron ingot per 4%, and partial repairs are fine — it uses what you have.

At 0% the engine dies, the driver is thrown clear, and a few seconds later the cart explodes and drops everything in its chests. Nothing is lost forever; it just has to be looted and re-crafted.

Fuel, speed, and the fine print

• 8 coal (or charcoal) per minute while the engine runs, taken from the driver's inventory first and then from the cart's own storage — so the coal you mine keeps you going.
• The driver's HUD shows fuel, run time and storage state.
• Tunnels are level and 4×4. Diagonal ones have stair-stepped walls; they're always wide enough.
• It won't cut bedrock, portals, barriers or command blocks, and it refuses to drive into lava.
• It can drive underwater — but the driver can still drown, so bring water breathing.
• The cart is not a shelter: mobs that are attacking the driver can still reach the raised seat.

Settings

Everything is adjustable in one commented file — data/drill_cart/function/config.mcfunction. Edit it, save, /reload, done. It covers fuel rate, drilling speed, durability loss per level, repair and upgrade costs (item, count and the text players see), headlight brightness and refresh rate, drill damage and damage type, knockback strength, and switches for whether the drill hurts players, whether mobs can reach the driver, and whether the driver is invulnerable while seated.

The menu reads its prices straight from that file, so whatever you set is what players are shown.

Installing

Single-player: drop the .zip (don't unzip it) into saves/<world>/datapacks, then /reload.

Server or Realm: put the .zip into the world's datapacks folder and restart, or upload the edited world back to the Realm. Check with /datapack list.

Ops can run /function drill_cart:give to get a cart without crafting.

Removing

/function drill_cart:uninstall drops every cart's storage on the ground and removes all carts and their scoreboards cleanly. Then disable the pack.

Compatibility

• Minecraft Java 26.3 (pack format 121). Vanilla only — no mods or loaders required.
• Server-side: the whole thing runs on the server, so players don't install anything.
• Multiplayer-safe: any number of carts can run at once, each with its own storage, level and fuel.
• Nothing is overridden. No vanilla loot tables, recipes or advancements are replaced, so it sits alongside other data packs without conflict.