Cars: Drive, Drift & Force Feedback

Cars

Drivable cars and motorcycles for Minecraft with real driving physics: tyre grip, proper drifting, bikes that lean into corners and do wheelies and stoppies, hills, suspension, headlights, horn, fuel and dyeable paint – with the keyboard or a steering wheel and pedals with force feedback.

Minecraft 1.21.8 – 26.3 on Fabric (Fabric API required), NeoForge and Forge. Works in singleplayer and on dedicated servers (install on both sides). Works with Sodium, Iris and shader packs.

The cars

All eight cars are life-size (the pickup is 5.6 blocks long), built from several hundred parts each: round tyres, see-through spokes with brake discs behind them, wheel arches, slanted windscreens, door seams and handles, mirrors, grilles, exhausts and a full interior.

Motorcycles (new in 1.11.0)

Bikes ride like bikes: they lean into corners (the faster and tighter, the deeper – they take a moment to fall into the lean, then turn), the rider leans with them with his hands on the grips and feet on the pegs, puts a foot down when stopping, and a parked bike rests on its side stand.

• Space + W – wheelie: the front comes up and stays up as long as you hold the gas
• Space + S at speed – stoppie: the rear lifts and the bike stops on its front wheel
• Space alone – the rear brake
• Wheelies and stoppies score points like drifts. On one wheel the bike barely steers.
• Crash hard – a wall, a bad landing, landing on one wheel – and the rider is thrown off and the bike falls on its side. Right-click it to stand it up again.

First person puts you behind the dash: the clocks and the screen at the bottom of the view, your hands on the bars when you look down, the horizon leaning with the bike.

All cars, bikes, the wheel, the engine and the chassis are in their own Cars tab in the creative inventory.

Controls

• W / S – throttle / brake and reverse, A / D – steer (the lock shrinks with speed)
• Space – handbrake: tap it in a corner to start a drift, holds the car on hills; on a bike the trick key (wheelie / stoppie / rear brake)
• H – horn, G – headlights (with light beams at night)
• R / V – shift up / down, M – manual / automatic gearbox
• F5 – cockpit view, Left Shift – get out
• Right-click with a dye to repaint, with coal (any furnace fuel) to refuel, with a wheel to repair

If another mod already uses one of these keys (Iris uses R and K, for example), the Cars key moves to a free one the first time you join a world, and the chat tells you where.

Entering a car switches to a third-person camera that follows the direction the car travels, so in a drift you see the car sliding sideways.

Drifting

Drive into a corner, steer and tap Space (the muscle car and the drift coupe slide on the throttle alone) – the tail steps out. On the keyboard the car countersteers by itself and the steering key sets how far it slides; with a steering wheel you countersteer yourself and the force feedback pulls the wheel the right way. Drift points at the top of the screen: longer, faster and more sideways drifts score more, a held drift multiplies up to x5, a crash loses the points.

Manual gearbox

Sequential with R / V or shift paddles, or a real H-shifter (gears 1–6 + R, the in-game lever moves with yours) and an optional clutch pedal. The engine is tied to the wheels: engine braking, a rev limiter that bounces the needle, over-revving down-shifts refused, a tall gear from low revs pulls weakly.

Steering wheel, pedals and force feedback

Plug in a wheel and drive – the keyboard keeps working at the same time. SDL3 is bundled (Windows, Linux, macOS), only the wheel’s own driver is needed (Logitech G HUB, Thrustmaster, Fanatec, MOZA …). On Windows, force feedback wheels are driven through DirectInput exactly like racing games do. The first time you sit in a car with a new wheel, a 20-second setup wizard opens (steering, gas, brake, buttons, paddles, clutch, H-shifter, force direction).

Force feedback is computed from the same tyre model as the physics, 500 times a second on its own thread:

• Steering: aligning torque from the front tyres – heavy in a fast corner, going light just before the fronts lose grip, then the caster pulls the wheel into a countersteer when the rear steps out. Every car feels different, from the light power steering of the hatchback to the heavy, downforce-loaded formula car.
• Road surface: a knock on every block seam, cobblestone and bricks rattle, polished stone is smooth, grass and gravel rumble, ice goes numb.
• Tyres: scrub when the fronts slide, rumble from sliding rears, ABS-like judder under hard braking.
• Engine: the firing frequency of each engine (1 to 16 cylinders) and the rev limiter.
• Jolts: crashes, landings, kerbs, mobs, gear changes, the handbrake at speed.

Press K for the wheel settings: strength, detail effects, steering range, calibration, a force test and a Force feedback details screen with a live graph of the forces while you keep driving.

Graphics

Clear-coat paint with sky and ground reflections, glowing headlights and tail lamps, brake lights, tyre marks and smoke, a motion-blurred wheel at speed, exhaust haze and backfire flames, spring-damped body motion (dive, squat and lean), visible crash damage on all four sides (dents, bent panels, smashed lamps, a loose bumper, a cracked windscreen – synced and saved, repair with a wheel) and a real cockpit view: dashboard with working gauges, a steering wheel that turns like yours, gear lever, handbrake, mirror, pedals and mats – and your own forearms on the wheel. With a shader pack the cars cast the pack’s own shadows.

Sounds

Every car and bike has its own engine, built from exhaust pulses in its real firing order and recorded at 6–9 rpms on and off the gas: the muscle car’s V8 burbles, the supercar’s V10 howls without turning into a thin buzz at the redline, the superbike’s cross-plane four growls and the motocross single pops. Turbo, pops, gear whine, skids, gravel, wind, horn and crashes. English and Czech.

Crafting

• Wheel ×4: leather around an iron ingot
• Engine: iron ingots around a piston (top) and a redstone block (middle)
• Car Chassis: iron blocks in an H shape
• Cars: glass panes on top, engine / chassis / engine (iron ingot for the hatchback, chassis for the pickup) and wheels at the bottom corners – the better cars add a diamond, an iron block, a redstone block or a netherite ingot on top (see the recipe book)
• Motorcycles: one item on top, engine / chassis / one item, wheels at the bottom corners – Superbike: glass pane and diamond, Motocross Bike: iron ingot and leather, Naked Bike: iron ingot and redstone

Config

config/cars.json: fuel, speed multiplier, ram and crash damage, camera distance, HUD, particles, tyre marks, drift assist and score, cockpit tilt, cockpit arms, manual gearbox, clutch requirement and more. Wheel settings live in config/cars_wheel.json.