Changelog

All notable changes to this project are documented in this file.

The format is based on Keep a Changelog, and this project adheres to Semantic Versioning.

[0.1.0] - 2026-07-27

Added

• Minecarts now hold the chunks they travel through, so items and passengers can be sent across long distances on a server where nobody is standing at the far end.
• Closed and looping tracks stop loading automatically. A journey is only allowed to continue while a cart keeps getting further from where it set off; a loop reaches its furthest point on the first lap and can never beat it, so it runs out of slack and every chunk it was holding is released. The same detector catches back-and-forth shuttles and self-propelled furnace carts with nobody watching. On default settings a minecart cannot be turned into a permanent chunk loader.
• A travel budget backstops the loop detector with a hard ceiling on how many chunks a single journey may load in total, independent of loop shape.
• Departure requires a token that is only issued to carts a real player has recently been near, so an unattended rail line cannot cycle itself forever. Two looser tiers are available for automated routes: one that only requires a player online somewhere on the server, and one with no human requirement at all, for servers that want fully automatic shuttles.
• A per-cart journey cooldown rate-limits how often the same cart may depart, measured from when its last journey started. The cooldown is waived if a player has interacted with the cart since, so stopping it, topping it up, and sending it off again just works without waiting out a timer.
• Carts that pause mid-route — at a sorting junction, a signal stop, or labouring up a hill — keep their chunks loaded and their journey intact for a configurable tolerance, so the journey simply continues rather than ending the moment a cart stops moving. Only once that tolerance expires without the cart resuming does the journey end.
• Carts travelling together (a train) are tracked as a single cluster and released together; a member that drifts more than the configured region radius from the rest of the group is dropped from the cluster and accounted for on its own rather than silently vanishing from the count.
• Arriving carts get a short settle hold so a detector rail or station redstone has time to fire and shunt them onward, in every enforcement mode. A separate, opt-in unload hold can extend that window so hoppers have time to drain a cart, but it requires permissive enforcement and is capped to protect against turning a station into a disguised chunk loader.
• In-flight journeys are written to persistent storage and survive a server restart: a cart that was travelling before a restart resumes its journey afterward instead of losing its progress or quietly becoming an unmanaged loader.
• A master enforcement switch: STRICT (default) runs the full loop detector, travel budget, and departure gates and is the setting the no-chunk-loader guarantee applies to; PERMISSIVE turns all of it off, prints a startup warning, and unlocks the unload hold, for admins who trust every player on their server.
• In STRICT mode every abusable setting is clamped to a hard ceiling, so STRICT stays a promise about behaviour rather than a set of dials that can quietly undo it.
• Per-cart-type control over which minecarts may depart at all (normal, chest, hopper, furnace); TNT and command-block carts can never be enabled, on either enforcement mode.
• A world blocklist or allowlist to include or exclude specific worlds or dimensions from ChunkCarts entirely.
• A cart whose journey ends early is left exactly where it stopped, with nothing lost, and the event can be logged with the specific reason it ended — reached its destination, ran into the loop detector, got stuck, ran out of budget, headed into unexplored terrain, or derailed — so an admin can tell working-as-intended apart from an actual problem. Optionally the last player who interacted with the stranded cart can be notified of where it stopped.
• /chunkcarts (alias /ccarts) with list, reload, and debug subcommands, gated behind the single chunkcarts.admin permission: list reports every active journey and exactly which chunks are held and why, reload re-reads the configuration without interrupting running journeys, and debug toggles per-poll logging so a journey's decisions can be watched live.
• A fully annotated config.yml documenting every setting in plain language next to the setting itself; the shipped defaults are the safe, recommended configuration and require no changes to use.
• Anonymous, opt-out usage statistics (server software, game version, player count, and the enforcement and departure-requirement settings in use) to guide which platforms and versions are worth continuing to support.
• Server-side support for Paper (and Paper forks) with a single jar covering Minecraft 1.21 through 26.2, built on Paper's asynchronous chunk loading; Spigot is refused rather than degraded, since it lacks that API and would stall the main thread on every chunk boundary a cart crossed.
• Server-side support for Fabric, NeoForge, and Forge, built per game version across the same 1.21–26.2 range (1.21.2 excluded, superseded within days of release).