Fire

Fire is a non-solid block which produces 15 units of light. It has animated faces on all four sides, and two more faces on the inside in an X shape. Fire blocks are only created naturally in the Nether. The Player can create fire using a flint and steel or a fire charge. Ghasts and Blazes can also create fire, as can lava and lightning. Fire spreads naturally to other nearby flammable blocks, and it can be placed as a block in hacked/edited clients.

Behavior
Fire is not available for use in Classic mode. Flint and steel is one method used to place fire in the environment. When placed, fire will burn for a short and randomly determined amount of time. If nothing flammable is adjacent to it, the flames will not spread, and will die out. Wooden planks, wood, leaves, vines, wool, fences, wooden stairs, and bookshelves are all flammable. If you place a bed in The End or Nether and try to sleep it will explode and create fire. Fire can melt ice, and TNT will detonate if exposed to fire. Fire will burn leaves slightly faster than the other flammable objects, suggesting the game has coding differences between some different types of flammable blocks. Many blocks do not burn away even though they may appear to catch fire. Two notable block types which do not burn away are wooden chests and crafting tables.

Fire will spread over flammable surfaces, slowly causing all the blocks it can reach to burn away. Fire can climb up walls, across floors and ceilings, and over small gaps. More precisely, a fire (or lava) block can turn any air block that is adjacent to a flammable block into a fire block. This can happen at a distance of up to one block downwards, one block sideways (including diagonals), and four blocks upwards of the original fire or lava source.

Mobs and players will catch light when exposed to fire. Fire will obstruct the player's view slightly and they will slowly lose life at a rate of ½ heart per second. This is the same rate that the player gains health in peaceful mode, so fire alone will not kill you in this mode. Fire will burn out after a while, but it is a good idea to try to jump into any nearby water as soon as possible. A bucket of water can function as a portable fire extinguisher as a player who is on fire can dump the water at their feet to put out the fire instantly.



Fire can be used to damage or kill mobs without causing them to become hostile to the player. Items or blocks falling into fire will catch light and quickly disappear. This trick can be used to dispose of unwanted materials, but it can also destroy valuable drops before they can be retrieved. Lava can set off TNT, but it may take several minutes to do so, and this usually gives time to clear the lava away before the TNT is triggered.

If they die as a result of fire damage, cows, pigs, and chickens will drop cooked meat; cows drop steak(s), pigs drop cooked porkchop(s), and chickens will drop a cooked chicken. However if burned with lava, they will sometimes still drop raw meat. This occurs if the lava damage was what killed the mob rather than the fire damage. When a mob is in lava, the lava damage is applied first, and fire damage is only applied if the mob survives the lava damage.

Punching or hitting the side of a burning block will extinguish the fire block 'attached' on that side. Hitting fire with a tool does not use up any uses for the tool. Placing water, sand or gravel will also extinguish fire.

Eternal Fire
Netherrack, a block found in the Nether, will burn forever when set on fire. It can therefore be a useful trap or defense material around the player's shelter; though the player should be reminded that while this is quite effective at killing hostile mobs, it's also a potential danger to passive mobs and the player him/herself, and any dropped items that fall in the fire will be lost.

Lit netherrack can be used as an alternative to torches. If the player is running low on coal, they can use netherrack and flint and steel instead. Netherrack fire is brighter than a torch, and can be quickly extinguished. Note that rain won't put out netherrack fire.

Chain Armor
It is possible to craft chain armor out of fire blocks. It is only possible to get actual fire blocks in a player's inventory by using the  command, Single Player Commands (SPC), or an inventory editor. Chain armor is crafted the same way as any other armor, and has a little bit more durability than armor made from gold ingots.

History
When introduced in Indev, fire could be directly placed, before flint and steel was added. Before furnaces were added, fire was used to smelt objects.

Since Alpha version 1.2.6, forest fires may start spontaneously if an above-ground lava pool is generated amongst trees during a biome's creation. This is a rare side-effect of starting a new world or exploring.

From Alpha to Beta 1.2_02, a non-netherrack flammable block, like wood, may burn continuously when its sides are surrounded by nonflammable blocks, like stone or dirt (the bottom is not necessary, though it is best not to have anything explicitly flammable underneath). A fire will only stay burning at the top of a flammable block, not on the sides or the bottom. Once the fire is burning, and has continued to do so for ten seconds or more without consuming the block beneath, one may remove all the adjacent blocks, and it will keep burning forever. If the block burns away, simply replace and reignite it, until it works. Alternatively, they can punch out any adjacent fires that appear instead of surrounding the block. Eternally burning blocks were fixed in Beta 1.3.

It was also possible to make larger blocks of endless fire by putting flammable blocks diagonally adjacent to a block that is burning continuously. Since the already-burning block counts as nonflammable, it is already on fire, and the adjacent blocks may also burn continuously. By igniting multiple blocks this way, one could make a grid of diagonally-adjacent burning blocks.

Notch has stated that he has disabled the infinite spreading of fire, which was in the 1.6 update. Notch's Twitter

Trivia

 * When fire contacts water, it hisses.
 * It is possible for lightning to light a surface on fire during thunderstorms, but it will almost immediately be put out by rain. In rare cases in SMP, fire may not get extinguished.
 * The texture for fire is not obtained from terrain.png; instead, the fire animation is calculated by code and drawn into the "FIRE TEX" area of the in-memory copy of terrain.png. Water, lava, and portal textures work similarly. This is why texture packs with greater than 16x16 pixel tiles have glitches; the area drawn on is not scaled to fit the larger texture.
 * While wooden planks are flammable, wooden slabs and double wooden slabs are not. These can be used to make fireproof wooden buildings, especially in the Nether. This no longer works as of 12w17a.
 * Though wooden planks and logs are flammable, they burn up very quickly, making them nearly useless when making a fireplace, bonfire, etc. The only block that burns forever is netherrack, along with bedrock in the End.
 * On very slow computers, when one sets a fire on the side of a block, logs off, and then logs back into the world, for a brief moment, they will see "FIRE TEX HNST!" (Meaning 'Fire texture, honest!') instead of the fire animation.
 * Entities, such as mobs or items, that are on fire do not emit any light.
 * Most players choose not to make fireplaces in wooden houses, due to that the fact that fire can burn down wood quickly.
 * Since 12w06a hitting fire in creative doesn't remove the block under the fire.
 * The fire item is also used for an Undefined Item. This item can occur when a world with items of a mod is played without the mod. This item cannot be placed and will disappear when clicked on.
 * If obtained via hacking or commands, Fire makes "wooden" sounds when placed.
 * Incinerators (used to quickly dispose of items) can be made by Cobblestone squares with flaming Netherrack in the middle, or a square with lava in the middle

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