There are a handful of different types of rails in Minecraft but of these, the powered rail is one of the most important. These types of rails in Minecraft are the key to any complex rail system builds because of their ability to influence the speed of minecarts. Once placed and activated, they open up a world of possibilities.
Powered rails look similar to the regular rails in-game except with two yellow lines along the metal rails and red intersecting lines in the interior. These require a pretty hefty investment of materials and can be quite the drain on a player's gold resources. The Minecraft recipe calls for six gold ingots, one stick, and one thing of redstone dust. This combination creates six individual sections of powered rails for players to place and activate.
Firstly, gold ingots come from smelting gold ore gathered with an iron pickaxe or combining gold nuggets. Gold ore is most often found from levels 0 to 32 in the Minecraft Overworld while the ingots themselves spawn in a wide variety of chests in both the Nether dimension as well as the Overworld. The other two materials, Redstone dust and sticks, drop from redstone ore mined with an iron pickaxe and through a crafting table and the combination of wood planks, respectively.
Once created, these rails can be placed in a similar way to the other types of rails in Minecraft. In order to take full advantage of these, players need to power these rails. These rails are a redstone mechanism and, as such, require a power component to alter the speed of minecarts that come across them. These power components include redstone torches, solid blocks of redstone, and daylight sensors among others. Once the rail's red pieces light up, the rail has been activated and will cause a minecart to accelerate.
Aside from crafting powered rails, they can be found around the Minecraft overworld. The key to farming these instead of crafting them is to explore mineshafts. Typically these contain chests that have a chance of containing up to four powered rails. Finding multiple chests and even multiple mineshafts is one way to acquire powered rails for players who lack the gold to build them.
An active powered rail accelerates minecarts with or without players in them. This works even if the minecart is stationary or if the cart is working against gravity. But these rails are even more adaptable as they have the ability to slow minecarts to a near stop when they are not powered. This versatility is the reason why Minecraft players rely on powered rails more often then the other specialty rails.
Minecraft is available now for PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One, and various other platforms.