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This article is about the furnace. For smelting recipes, see Smelting.

A Furnace is a special block currently only available in the Indev, Infdev, Alpha and Beta versions of Minecraft. Furnaces can naturally occur in NPC villages. 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, coal, charcoal and lava buckets (plus chests, workbenches, bookshelves, sticks, saplings, jukeboxes, note blocks, locked chests, wooden stairs, trapdoors 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.

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.

Items such as gold, and iron blocks can be smelted into ingots.

Since Beta 1.8, you can cook up to 64 pieces of food at a time, as stated by Jeb.[1]

Occurrence

A couple of furnaces can be found in houses with lava in NPC Villages.

Crafting

Ingredients Input » Output
Cobblestone Template:Grid/Crafting Table

Fuel efficiency

Fuel Code Value Burning Time Number of
Operations
per Fuel
Amount to
Light a Furnace
All Night
Seconds per
Wood Block (log)[a]
Amount needed to
burn a stack (64) of items
Template:Grid Coal 1600 80s 8 6.75 - 8
Template:Grid Charcoal 1600 80s 8 6.75 up to 70s[b] 8
Template:Grid Wooden Plank 300 15s 1.5 36 60s 43
Template:Grid Oak Sapling 100 5s 0.5 108 - 128
Template:Grid Birch Sapling 100 5s 0.5 108 - 128
Template:Grid Spruce Sapling 100 5s 0.5 108 - 128
Template:Grid Stick 100 5s 0.5 108 40s 128
Template:Grid Fence 300 15s 1.5 36 40s 43
Template:Grid Wooden Stairs 300 15s 1.5 36 40s 43
Template:Grid Trapdoor 300 15s 1.5 36 20s 43
Template:Grid Oak Wood 300 15s 1.5 36 15s 43
Template:Grid Birch Wood 300 15s 1.5 36 15s 43
Template:Grid Spruce Wood 300 15s 1.5 36 15s 43
Template:Grid Crafting Table 300 15s 1.5 36 15s 43
Template:Grid Bookshelf 300 15s 1.5 36 10s 43
Template:Grid Chest 300 15s 1.5 36 7.5s 43
Template:Grid Jukebox 300 15s 1.5 36 7.5s 43
Template:Grid Note Block 300 15s 1.5 36 7.5s 43
Template:Grid Locked Chest 300 15s 1.5 36 - 43
Template:Grid Lava Bucket 20000 1000s 100 0.54 - 1
Template:Grid Blaze Rod 2400 120s 12 4.5 - 6
  1. This column is the unit-of-wood-equivalent. Calculation made once the fuel item is converted back to wood.
  2. The fuel cost of turning a wood block into charcoal (1/8 of a second charcoal item) is already deducted from this amount.

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 item to nothing, put in 44 wooden planks, then take the first two smelted blocks out, and put two extra unsmelted blocks in later.
  • As for 1.8, meat and fish stack, so it's possible to cook them like any other item.
  • The bonus of using charcoal or other forms of wood is that they are a renewable resource. While there is an abundance of coal in many cave systems, it is still necessary to search out new deposits. Trees, however, can be regrown; see tree farming. Charcoal is the most efficient form of wood burning, but Wooden Planks are second best and can be made quickly.
  • 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. Through this they can essentially be used as fireplaces (since there is no specific fireplace block currently in the game) by placing lots of long-lasting fuel items in it (lava buckets for an example), and then "lighting" the fireplace by placing a burnable item in it.
  • For a 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 working at this scale, the most efficient fuel would be Coal (or Charcoal). The most efficient method is to use about 16-32 Furnaces and use 4 Coal/Charcoal for fuel and 32 of the blocks that need to be smelted. This can convert an entire inventory's worth of resources in the timespan of around 10 minutes.
  • The Furnace is featured in the "Hot Topic" achievement. And it is required for the "Acquire hardware" and "Delicous fish" achievements, because you need to smelt iron and bake fish for those achievements.
  • WARNING: They are also known to completely delete anything in them if the last piece of fuel is burned.
  • Since all types of logs burn for the same amount of time as wooden planks, converting logs to planks is a quick and easy way to quadruple the burning time (instead of 16 logs burning for 240 seconds, converting them to 64 planks would burn for 960 seconds).

Trivia

  • In the first version of the game, you can have the same effect as a furnace by dropping items on the ground and then burning them with the flint and steel. This was the only way to smelt ores.
  • As of the Halloween update, furnaces will face towards the player when placed.[2]
  • Despite paper being a burnable resource in the real world, you cannot use it as fuel. This might be the case because it doesn't burn for very long, and it only creates a small flame and low temperature.
  • Lava is one time use when using as fuel. It is usually used to smelt a large amount of ores at once.

Bugs

  • Some people have reported that if the last piece of fuel burns, all items in the furnace can disappear.


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