MineCoasters 1.8.1

Two new track styles, spinning carts, a much bigger Element Placer catalog, and a fully redesigned in-game Manual. MC 1.21.1 / NeoForge 21.1.230. Existing worlds carry over.

New in 1.8.0

Two new track styles — both pair with every gauge, alongside Skeleton / Triangle / Box / Wooden / IBox:

• Square — the Triangle lattice's sibling: an open square-prism lattice of four chords tied by corner rings and face diagonals.
• Simple — the low-budget wild mouse look: thin rails on a dense ladder of flat ties and nothing at all below the tie line. It reads cheap next to the engineered styles, which is the point.

Spinning carts — spinning is a property of the cart, not the track, so any layout can have one. The Cart Workstation's new Bearing tool places two colour-coded plates in your design: everything on the grey side is chassis, locked to the rails; everything on the amber side spins freely. Real free-bearing physics drives it — cornering and launch forces whip an off-centre tub through tight bends, riders count as weight, and the build is the tuning. Vertical bearings swing like a suspended gondola; several independent bearings per cart are allowed (twin tubs, or an S&S-style 4D car). Tubs settle square on lifts, brakes and launches, and impossible builds (bridged plates, nested tubs) lock the cart and highlight the offending voxels rather than guessing at the physics. Two ready-made designs ship in the Load list: wild_mouse and ss_4d.

Element Placer: 8 → 21 elements. The catalog now covers turning (banked turn, overbank, s-bend, helix), vertical (drop, airtime hill, top hat, non-inverting loop), inverting (vertical loop, half-loop, immelmann, dive loop, Norwegian loop, pretzel loop, zero-G roll, inline roll, corkscrew, cobra roll) and utility runs (lift hill, brake run/station, launch — segment-typed and speed-set as they place). Elements are shaped from their own dimensions rather than eyeballed, rolls can be heartlined, every handed element has a left/right switch, and blueprint capture now actually completes — with a visible capture mode while it's armed.

Cart Workstation — a Select tool (select a cuboid region, delete it or move just that region), Ctrl/Cmd+S to save, and seats now sit flush on the voxel beneath them.

New in 1.8.1

The MineCoasters Manual is now a proper book:

• Bright new look — warm paper pages with clean dark-ink type, orange section titles and far more breathing room, replacing the old dark panel.
• Chapters + a clickable Contents page — 10 chapters, ~30 sections, page numbers; click any row to jump straight there, and a Contents button brings you back. Left/Right arrow keys turn pages, with a proper page-turn sound.
• Illustrated throughout — 29 hand-designed illustrations in one consistent style, one on nearly every section: the anchor axes, the linking rule, segment types, every machine, the water rides, the spin bearing, and more.
• Heavily edited — about a third shorter, cut of fluff, and rewritten to be friendlier and more direct. Same facts, fewer words.