Rail Trace

Find open ends and mismatched connections in an existing vanilla railway without riding the whole route.

Look directly at a vanilla rail within six blocks, then run /railtrace scan. Run /railtrace for help. Install on the server for multiplayer, or in your single-player instance. Players do not need a separate client install when joining a modded server.

Rail Trace follows reciprocal connections from the rails' current shapes, including curves and ascending track. It reports the connected rails inspected, connections, slopes, observed loops, open ports and mismatched ports. It also counts unpowered powered rails as a current observation, not necessarily a fault. Up to eight coordinate hints point you toward issues.

Deliberate limits

• Reads at most 512 rails, within 64 blocks on each axis from the starting rail.
• Never loads chunks, changes track, spawns particles or moves items.
• A five-second per-player cooldown bounds repeat requests.
• Unloaded chunks or survey limits produce an explicit INCOMPLETE report, not a false disconnected verdict.
• Vanilla rail, powered rail, detector rail and activator rail only. Modded rails are not modeled.
• This is a topology check, not minecart physics. Connected track is not a guarantee of enough momentum, safe travel or working timing. Detector rails and powered switching are observed only in their current state.
• Server commands can inspect rails across walls and claims. Use only on servers where that information is appropriate.

Versions and testing

Separate builds for Forge 1.20.1, NeoForge 1.21.1 and NeoForge 26.3. Use only the matching file and loader.

New beta release; bugs may remain. Pure topology tests and exact packaged dedicated-server startup and behavior tests passed on each supported version. No graphical client playtest has been completed in the cloud environment.

Original code and artwork by RickCode. MIT license. No dependencies beyond the matching Minecraft loader.