Furnace

A Furnace is a special block currently only available in the Indev, Infdev, Alpha and Beta versions of Minecraft. Before the furnace appeared, smelting was accomplished by creating a fire and dropping the ores into it. The furnace, when right-clicked, has its own smelting menu where smelting operations can be done. It consists of one field for the object that will be smelted, one field for the fuel and one field for the output object. Wood, wooden planks, sticks, coal and lava buckets (plus chests, workbenches, bookshelves and fences, none of which are very efficient) are all fuels. Each smelting operation takes 10 seconds. Furnaces resemble dispensers, but the two blocks have different uses and crafting recipes.

A pickaxe is required to pick up the furnace. Items inside a furnace will be destroyed when the furnace is destroyed.

Smelting will work when the smelting menu is closed, as long as there are still objects to smelt and there is enough fuel. The fire icon diminishes to represent the fuel burn time. When the fire icon diminishes fully, another fuel item is consumed and the heat is refilled. If all objects are smelted, the furnace will stop using additional fuel. If there is no fuel left, the furnace will become inactive. If a smelting process was running, it will be cancelled and must be redone.

As a building material
Furnaces take more time to destroy than other blocks. However, since they take eight blocks of cobblestone to create, they are an inefficient building material. They are also weaker against TNT than ordinary stone or cobblestone.

Tips and tricks

 * 8 coals will smelt an entire stack of 64 blocks. 43 wooden planks are the next best thing - 43 wooden planks are capable of generating 64.5 smelted blocks. If you want to be really efficient and not lose that half-plank to nothing, put in 44 wooden planks, then take the first two smelted blocks out, and put two extra unsmelted blocks in.


 * Remember that meat (like other food items) won't stack. This means that 1 coal will fuel between 6 and 7 units of meat, depending on how fast you are with re-loading the furnace. Sticks come in handy, as two sticks should be enough to cook an eighth unit of meat without too much fuel left over.


 * The bonus of using planks is that they are a renewable resource. While there is an abundance of coal in many cave systems, the ever expanding distances to find new deposits quickly outweigh the increased burning duration. Trees, however, can be regrown. See tree farming. Also, after the Beta 1.2 update, wood can be smelted into charcoal with identical properties to coal.


 * A single bucket of lava will allow for smelting of 100 blocks. The largest stack of blocks is 64. Considering that each smelting operation takes 10 seconds, to maximize the efficiency of a lava bucket, place a lava bucket with 64 blocks of unsmelted material (such as sand, cobblestone, etc.) and return between 6 minutes and 10 minutes 40 seconds later to remove 36 smelted blocks and insert 36 more unsmelted blocks.


 * Furnaces can provide light if you've run out of torches. (And they can make charcoal for use in torches.)


 * For large project you can use more than one furnace, it is not uncommon to see a wall of furnaces near a large project, not used all the time, but to reduce the amount of time it takes to smelt a large number of items. When you’re working at this scale you should really be using Charcoal or coal.

Trivia

 * As of the Halloween update, furnaces will face towards the player when placed.


 * As of the January 13th Update, the top of furnaces have a texture similar to cobblestone. They used to have a texture exactly the same as stone, which is useful if you've run out of stone blocks.


 * Furnaces can be used as a temporary light source.


 * It's also possible to smelt diamond ore, although the block is unobtainable.

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