Smelting

Smelting is a vital action in Minecraft. It allows you to make nourishing foods by cooking raw meat, smelt raw ores to get processed ingots, make charcoal to craft torches, and smelt sand to obtain glass.

The crafting recipe for a furnace requires 8 pieces of cobblestone placed around the edges of a 3✖3 crafting grid, leaving an empty space in the middle. Place it in the world and interact with it to open its GUI.

Place the items to be smelted (meat, raw iron, etc.) in the top left slot, and the fuel in the bottom left slot, and smelting will begin (smelting will continue even if you close the interface). Each item will take 10 seconds to smelt. Smelting will stop under any of these four conditions:

• The furnace runs out of smeltable items.
• The furnace runs out of fuel.
• The output slot becomes full.
• The furnace is broken, in which case the furnace and all its contents will spill out onto the floor as loose items.

Different sorts of fuel will smelt different amounts of items. Wooden tools will smelt one item each, logs and planks will smelt 1.5 items (for example, two planks will smelt three items), coal or charcoal will smelt 8 items, a block of coal will smelt 80 items, and a bucket of lava will smelt 100 items (it will also leave behind an empty bucket). For a complete list of all the different fuels, see the Minecraft Wiki.

Once you remove smelted items from the output slot, experience will be rewarded, depending on the item smelted and the amount smelted. Some items yield more experience than others when smelted (for example, smelting raw gold yields more experience per item than raw iron or raw copper).

While smelting is in progress, it is important not to move too far away from the furnace, otherwise it will stop smelting until you get in range again.

There are also two other types of furnaces, designed to smelt specific items: The blast furnace and the smoker. The crafting recipe for a blast furnace requires one furnace, 5 iron ingots, and 3 smooth stone. The crafting recipe for a smoker requires on furnace and 4 logs. The blast furnace is used to smelt ores and their products (raw iron, raw gold, etc.). The blast furnace can smelt one item in 5 seconds (twice as fast as a regular furnace). The smoker is used to cook raw meats. It can smelt one item in 5 seconds.

The furnace.

The blast furnace.

The smoker.

The smelting interface.