What a furnace is
The furnace is the original smelting block in Minecraft. You feed it raw materials in the top slot and fuel in the bottom slot, and it cooks the input into something more useful. Iron ore becomes iron ingots, raw chicken becomes cooked chicken, sand becomes glass, and so on.
It’s one of the first blocks most players make, usually within an hour of starting a new world. You need a furnace to get iron tools, glass for windows, charcoal for torches when coal runs out, and cooked food that fills hunger faster than raw food.
Two newer smelting blocks (the blast furnace and the smoker) work twice as fast but only handle specific items. The regular furnace is still the everyday workhorse because it smelts everything.
How to craft a furnace
Place 8 cobblestone in a crafting table, leaving the center slot empty. That gives you one furnace.
The recipe also accepts a few cobblestone variants:
- Cobbled deepslate (8 blocks)
- Blackstone (8 blocks)
You can also pick up a furnace from a village; abandoned villages often have one sitting in a partly-broken house. Mine it with any pickaxe (wooden works fine) and it drops itself.
How to use a furnace
Right-click a placed furnace to open its interface. Three slots show up: the top slot is for the input (what you want to smelt), the bottom slot is for fuel, and the slot on the right is the output.
Drop fuel in the bottom slot and an item in the top slot. The flame icon will start burning, and a progress arrow shows the smelting in motion. When the arrow fills, the output appears on the right and you can drag it into your inventory.
If you collect the finished items by clicking them out of the output slot, you also gain experience orbs. The XP is stored inside the furnace and released when you remove the results, so opening a furnace that finished a stack of iron while you were away is satisfying.
Furnace fuels and how long each one lasts
Different fuels burn for different amounts of time. Each item smelts in 10 seconds (200 ticks), so a fuel that burns for 80 seconds smelts 8 items.
| Fuel | Items smelted |
|---|---|
| Lava bucket | 100 |
| Block of coal | 80 |
| Dried kelp block | 20 |
| Blaze rod | 12 |
| Coal or charcoal | 8 |
| Any wooden plank | 1.5 |
| Stick | 0.5 |
A few notes on fuel choices in practice:
- A lava bucket is the most efficient single-item fuel. When it finishes, you get an empty bucket back in the fuel slot, which can jam hopper-fed fuel pipelines.
- Coal blocks are easier than lava once you’re past the early game. They stack, they don’t need a bucket, and 9 coal makes one block that smelts 80 items.
- Dried kelp blocks are the best renewable fuel. A kelp farm feeding into a smoker for the food, plus dried kelp blocks for the furnace, is a closed loop.
- Charcoal works exactly like coal. If you don’t have a coal vein nearby, smelt logs into charcoal and use that charcoal to smelt more things.
What you can smelt
The furnace handles every smelting recipe in the game. The most common ones:
- Ores into ingots: raw iron to iron ingot, raw gold to gold ingot, raw copper to copper ingot. Ore blocks themselves still smelt directly if you silk-touch them.
- Food: raw beef, chicken, porkchop, mutton, rabbit, cod, salmon, potato, and kelp all cook into their edible forms.
- Sand into glass. Red sand also works and gives plain glass.
- Cobblestone into stone, then stone into smooth stone.
- Clay ball into brick, clay block into terracotta.
- Cracked stone bricks from regular stone bricks (works on cracked nether bricks and cracked deepslate bricks too).
- Charcoal from any log or wood block.
- Wet sponge into a dry sponge. The dry sponge can absorb water again.
Anything a blast furnace can smelt, a regular furnace can also smelt. Same with a smoker. The newer blocks specialize for speed.
Smelting time and experience
A regular furnace takes 10 seconds (200 ticks) to smelt one item. Each item gives a small amount of XP when you collect the result:
- Iron ingot: 0.7 XP per ingot
- Gold ingot: 1.0 XP per ingot
- Copper ingot: 0.7 XP per ingot
- Cooked food: 0.35 XP per item
- Glass: 0.1 XP per piece
- Charcoal: 0.15 XP per piece
The XP is cached inside the furnace itself. If you smelt a full stack of raw iron and leave it sitting, the XP waits for you. Pull the ingots out by hand and the orbs spawn.
One trick: hopper-out a furnace and the XP is discarded silently because no player is collecting the items. If you care about XP, take the results out by hand.
Furnace, blast furnace, or smoker?
The three smelting blocks share the same input/fuel/output layout. The differences:
- Furnace smelts everything at 10 seconds per item. Use it for general work.
- Blast furnace smelts ores and metal items at 5 seconds per item. Twice as fast, but it won’t smelt food, sand, clay, or logs.
- Smoker smelts food at 5 seconds per item. Won’t smelt anything else.
If you’re cooking large batches of meat, a smoker is worth the extra iron. If you’re processing ores in bulk, build a blast furnace. Otherwise the regular furnace handles whatever you throw at it.
Hoppers, comparators, and automation
A furnace accepts hoppers on every side, and the side determines what the hopper does:
- Hopper into the top: feeds the input slot.
- Hopper into the side: feeds the fuel slot.
- Hopper under the furnace: pulls finished items out of the output slot.
This three-hopper setup is the basic furnace array used for AFK iron and food production. Stacked vertically, a single chest can feed dozens of furnaces from one hopper line.
A comparator pulled off the side of a furnace reads the output slot. The signal strength scales with how full the output is, so you can wire a comparator to fire a redstone signal when a batch finishes.
Tips and common mistakes
- Smelt cobblestone into stone, then stone into smooth stone. Smooth stone needs two passes through the furnace, but it’s worth it for builds and mason villager trades.
- If the furnace shows fuel burning but the input arrow isn’t moving, either the input slot is empty or the output slot is full.
- Lava buckets are not always the best deal. If you don’t have a quick way to retrieve the empty bucket, you’re tying up iron.
- Don’t break a furnace mid-smelt. You’ll lose the partially smelted item and any XP that was waiting.
- Wooden tools (axes, shovels, hoes) work as fuel and burn for the same duration as their plank cost. Worn-out tools are decent emergency fuel.
- An active furnace emits light level 13. Useful for hiding light sources inside walls or under floors.
Java vs Bedrock
Furnace recipes and smelting times are identical on both editions. The one notable difference is how XP releases: Java holds all the XP until you pull items out, then releases it in one burst (capped at 100 levels per pickup). Bedrock releases XP per item more steadily. For 99% of play you won’t notice.
Frequently asked questions
How do you make a furnace?
Place 8 cobblestone in a crafting table with the center slot empty. The recipe also accepts cobbled deepslate or blackstone.
What’s the best fuel for a furnace?
Coal blocks are the most practical: they stack, they’re easy to make from 9 coal each, and they give 80 items per block. Lava buckets give 100 items per bucket but tie up an iron bucket per use. Dried kelp blocks are the best renewable option.
How long does a furnace take to smelt one item?
Ten seconds, or 200 game ticks. A blast furnace or smoker does the same job in five seconds for the items it accepts.
Can a furnace smelt everything a blast furnace can?
Yes. The blast furnace is a faster, specialized version. A regular furnace handles every smelting recipe in the game.
Does a furnace give XP?
Yes. The XP is cached in the furnace and released when you take items out of the output slot by hand. Hopper extraction skips the XP.
Can a furnace be powered by redstone?
Not directly. A furnace runs as long as it has fuel and input. A comparator can read its output, but redstone doesn’t start or stop the smelting itself.
Why is my furnace burning fuel but not smelting?
Most likely the output slot is full and the furnace can’t deliver the next finished item. Empty the output slot and the smelting resumes. Less commonly, the input is something the furnace can’t smelt.
The bottom line
The furnace is one of the few blocks you’ll use in every Minecraft world from your first night to your last build. Keep one near your storage, hopper it once you’re past the early game, and pick the fuel that matches what you’re doing: coal blocks for general use, dried kelp for sustainability, lava if you have an empty bucket to spare.