Minecraft Next: Roads and Canals

The glaring issue with a better voxel construction game is how to implement diagonal roads and rails etc. There is a design conflict between maintaining very atomic block rules, or alternatively implementing multi-block rules to accomplish decent roads where:

• resources are proportional to road distance
• roads can be built one block at a time
• there is a minimal solution that works early in the game - before gathering a ton of resources to make very wide roads/rails
• because multi-block, wider roads seem to be the go-to solution for diminishing differences in block resources between straight and diagonal roads, but they cost so much.

Roads

Roads behave much like rails, except that sloping 1 block level vertically requires 3 blocks horizontally. Thus roads may take longer to get up a hill than a mine-cart. Roads can also be of any block width to allow for more traffic. Some vehicles require a minimum road width of 2 blocks.

Like rails, roads must be contiguous in order to work in important ways.  Of course, roads do not need redstone torches to work.

Road vehicles require either draft animals to pull them, magical orbs to propel them, or eventually, a solar powered motor. (more on that later)

Roads and Trade

Roads, rails, and ships must connect to each other correctly in order for large scale trade and travel systems to work correctly.

Roads enable small-scale shops and street vendors to operate. However, these benefit by connecting to larger trade systems.

Many structures require roads to connect to, or to be adjacent to. This includes:

• town squares
• store fronts
• vendor carts and wagons
• stables and storage garages
• warehouses (although warehouses may connect straight to rail stations and sea ports without using roads.)

Roads officially connect cities, towns, sea ports, rail stations, and warehouses. This enables both travel and trade infrastructure for settlers and players. Players can automate trade and travel through training settlers and devices with customized algorithms.

Canals?

I have found canals to be a really cool thing to build in Minecraft, and I have wished that the game had more features pertinent to them.

Canals could be used to allow ships through narrow spans of land, or because they are more interesting than roads.

Features needed to add canal functionality would be a lock system, and potentially revamped water physics. At present, water does not "fill" anything. (However, to meddle with this long standing behavior could be troublesome.) Filling a canal is a very tedious task without new available water physics.

Perhaps a special water pump or siphon could be built with a recipe, to temporarily change water physics while activated.

After these features, one could easily adapt a simple sea port to the head of a canal at a larger body of water (as sea ports must be adjacent to a large body of water) And then use a smaller type of ship (built at a ship yard) in order to make use of "canals".