Create Wiki · Contraptions
Gantry Carriage and Gantry Shaft
A gantry is made of two blocks: the Gantry Shaft, a spinning axis, and the Gantry Carriage, which slides along it carrying its structure. It is the tool for cranes, overhead travelling cranes and machines that sweep an area, on one, two or three axes.
Quick facts
- Category
- Contraptions
- Stress
- Gantry Shaft has no cost of its own; the carriage follows the shaft speed
- Speed
- RPM ÷ 512 block per tick: 2.5 blocks/s at 64 RPM, 9.8 at most
- Travel
- Up to the end of the Gantry Shaft, no poles or rope
- Direction
- From the shaft's orientation and the sense of its rotation
- Redstone
- Powered shaft: carriages stop and pass the rotation on
- Cascade
- A shaft on a carriage (or the reverse) follows without glue
- Carriage placement
- Against a Gantry Shaft on another axis; starts by itself when the speed changes
- Version
- Create 6.0.8 · Minecraft 1.21.1
Crafting table recipe (shaft: 8 per craft)
→ 8 Gantry Shafts
The shaft, a spinning rail
The Gantry Shaft is placed in a line like a shaft, and both ends take an end-cap shape. A Gantry Carriage placed against it slides as soon as it turns, and stops at the end of the line.
A structure on the carriage
Redstone stops the carriages
A redstone signal on the Gantry Shaft freezes every carriage on it. The shaft keeps spinning though: its rotation goes elsewhere.
Rotation passes to the carriage
Two orientations
A Gantry Shaft has a placement direction, visible on its end caps. Two shafts placed head to tail and driven by the same rotation send their carriages in opposite directions.
Reversing the travel
A carriage's direction depends on the shaft's orientation and on the sense of rotation. Reverse the rotation with a gearshift and the carriages head back the other way: that is how you make a back-and-forth run.
Same rule for the passed-on rotation
When a carriage passes rotation to its shaft, the sense of that output follows the same rules. Keep it in mind before hooking up a machine that only works one way.
No glue between them
A Gantry Shaft placed on a carriage attaches by itself, without glue, and carriages sitting on a moving shaft follow it too.
Cascaded gantries
Stacking shafts and carriages this way covers two or three axes: a travelling bridge going back and forth, a carriage running along it, and a third one going up and down. Each level has its own rotation.
Crafting the carriage
The Gantry Carriage is crafted like a bearing, with a cogwheel instead of the shaft: wooden slab, andesite casing, cogwheel, top to bottom. It slides at RPM ÷ 512 block per tick, like a piston.
The carriage up close
A Gantry Carriage only holds on against a Gantry Shaft whose axis differs from its own: remove the shaft and the carriage drops as an item. Its front face, pointing away from the shaft, carries the structure. There is nothing to switch on: as soon as the shaft's speed changes, the carriage assembles whatever is glued to it and gets going. It moves RPM ÷ 512 block per tick, capped at 0.49 block per tick, which is 2.5 blocks per second at 64 RPM. In the loop, framed on the carriage, it takes a structure of glued planks along to the end of the shaft.
Build ideas
A crane: a Gantry Shaft up high, a carriage carrying a Rope Pulley. A quarry: two cascaded gantries sweeping a square with drills. A side lift running along a building front, driven by a lever.
Common mistakes
Carriage not moving? It must sit right against the Gantry Shaft, wheels on its side, and the shaft must be turning. It will not start if its structure touches a fixed block. At the end of the line it stops: extend the shaft or reverse the rotation.
Powering a gantry
Rotation enters at one end of the Gantry Shaft, as in a regular shaft, and spreads along the whole line. A gearbox and a lever on a gearshift are enough for a back-and-forth run controlled by hand.
What the loops do not show
The Gantry Shaft and the carriage wheels are drawn by us from the game's code, since our engine did not have them. The indicator particles of the scene are left out.
Related pages
Sources for the numbers (Create 6.0.8 code)
- Recipes: crafting/kinetics/gantry_shaft.json (8 shafts), gantry_carriage.json (wooden slab, andesite casing, cogwheel)
- Stress: AllBlocks.GANTRY_SHAFT (CStress.setNoImpact())
- Speed: GantryShaftBlockEntity.getPinionMovementSpeed (clamp(-speed / 512, -0.49, 0.49)), GantryContraptionEntity.tickContraption
- Redstone: GantryShaftBlock.POWERED (carriages stopped, rotation relayed), GantryCarriageBlockEntity.getGantryPinionModifier
- Cascade: Contraption.moveGantryPinion / moveGantryShaft
- Rendering: OrientedRotatingVisual.gantryShaft, GantryCarriageRenderer (added by us, see engine_create/REQUESTS.md)
- Simulation: WIKI/contraption_sim.py (carried blocks, movement times, ropes and actors recomputed from Create's code)
- Carriage: GantryCarriageBlock.canSurvive / getFacingForPlacement, GantryCarriageBlockEntity.onSpeedChanged (assembly)
- Scenes: GantryScenes.introForShaft, introForPinion (close-up on the carriage), redstone, direction, subgantry
Original texts and animations by Create France, rendered from the mod's Ponder scenes. Create is a mod by the Create Team, not affiliated with Create France.