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Template:BlockTileEntity

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

A Furnace is used to heat blocks and turn them into other items. Furnaces are considered one of the fundamental blocks required to advance in Survival mode. Furnaces can naturally occur in NPC villages. Before the furnace appeared, smelting was accomplished by creating a fire and dropping the ores into it. Furnaces are currently available in all versions of Minecraft except for Classic.

Usage

The furnace, when right-clicked, has its own menu where heating 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.

Input » Output
Template:Grid2/Furnace

Wood, wooden planks, wooden pressure plates, coal, charcoal, blaze rods and lava buckets (plus chests, crafting tables, 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.

Smelting will continue to work when the smelting menu is closed, as long as there are still objects to heat 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. The furnace will also stop if the output field contains a full stack, or if it contains a different item (e.g., trying to smelt gold ore with iron ingots in the output). 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.

Gold and iron ores can be smelted into ingots. Furnaces can also be used to smelt redstone ore, lapis lazuli ore, coal ore, and diamond ore (obtained with the Silk Touch enchantment) and returns 1 redstone, lapis lazuli, coal, or diamond respectively.

When the items smelted in a furnace are collected, they drop experience orbs equal to the number of items in the stack. This makes furnaces a reliable (if slow) early source of experience. (As of prerelease 12w22a)

Natural occurrence

Furnaces can be found inside NPC villages. These naturally occurring furnaces are found in the blacksmith workshops, which contain two furnaces. They are, however, completely empty.

File:2011-10-09 17.46.27.png

Naturally occurring furnaces in an NPC village.

Crafting

Ingredients Input » Output
Cobblestone Template:Grid2/Crafting Table

As a crafting ingredient

Ingredients Input » Output
Furnace,
Minecart
Template:Grid2/Crafting Table

Fuel efficiency

Sleeping while smelting/cooking items will not speed up the process.

Fuel 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:Grid2 Coal 80s 8 6.75 - 8
Template:Grid2 Charcoal 80s 8 6.75 up to 69s[b] 8
Template:Grid2 Wood 15s 1.5 36 15s 43
Template:Grid2 Wooden Planks 15s 1.5 36 60s 43
Template:Grid2 Wooden Slabs 7.5s 0.75 48 60s 96
Template:Grid2 Saplings 5s 0.5 108 - 128
Template:Grid2 Tools and Weapons 10s 1 54 5s to 10s 64
Template:Grid2 Wooden Pressure Plate 15s 1.5 36 30s 43
Template:Grid2 Stick 5s 0.5 108 40s 128
Template:Grid2 Fence 15s 1.5 36 40s 43
Template:Grid2 Wooden Stairs 15s 1.5 36 40s 43
Template:Grid2 Trapdoor 15s 1.5 36 20s 43
Template:Grid2 Crafting Table 15s 1.5 36 15s 43
Template:Grid2 Bookshelf 15s 1.5 36 10s 43
Template:Grid2 Chest 15s 1.5 36 7.5s 43
Template:Grid2 Jukebox 15s 1.5 36 7.5s 43
Template:Grid2 Note Block 15s 1.5 36 7.5s 43
Template:Grid2 Huge Brown Mushroom 15s 1.5 36 - 43
Template:Grid2 Huge Red Mushroom 15s 1.5 36 - 43
Template:Grid2 Blaze Rod 120s 12 4.5 - 5.3
Template:Grid2 Lava Bucket 1000s 100 0.54 - 0.64
  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, 1/64 of a third) is already deducted from this amount.

Video

Furnace/video


Achievements

Main article: Achievements
Icon Achievement In-game description Prerequisites Actual requirements (if different) Version restriction Xbox points earned
Advancement-plain-raw Hot Topic Construct a furnace out of eight stone blocks Time to Mine! Pick up a Furnace from a Crafting Table. None 15G

History

Jigsaw Block (top texture) JE2 BE2
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Since the Halloween Update, furnaces will face towards the player when placed.[1] Before the update, they faced away when placed.

Since the Beta 1.2 January 13th update, the top of furnaces have a texture similar to cobblestone. They used to have a texture exactly the same as stone.

Since Beta 1.8, you can cook up to 64 pieces of food at a time.[2] Since meats can stack, it's possible to cook them like any other item. Before 1.8, the player could only cook 1 piece of food at a time (e.g. a single porkchop).

Before the Beta 1.9 pre-releases, furnaces took longer to destroy.

After the official release of 1.2.5, players could use Shift+click to put items into furnaces more easily.

As a building material

Since the Beta 1.9 Pre-releases, Furnaces no longer take as long to destroy. Since they take eight blocks of cobblestone to create, they are an inefficient building material. Placing furnaces adjacent of another furnace is more difficult as well, as right-clicking the existing furnace will pop-up the furnace menu rather than allowing to build the furnace. The player always has to build against another non-furnace block. Furnaces are weaker against TNT than ordinary stone or cobblestone.

Tips and tricks

  • 8 Coal or charcoal will smelt an entire stack of 64 items. Wooden Planks are the next best thing, with 43 being able to smelt an entire stack of 64 items.
  • The bonus of using charcoal or other forms of wood is that they are a renewable resource, and capable of being made by 2 pieces of wood (1 ingredient and 1 fuel per coal). 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).
  • Blaze rods are another renewable source of fuel, as they last 50% longer than coal, although the player has to actively farm them in the nether fortresses, which aren't easy to find to begin with.
  • 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 into 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 is required for the "Acquire Hardware" and "Delicious Fish" achievements, because you need to smelt iron and cook fish for those achievements.
  • 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).

Bugs

  • There is a bug where you can use an infinite amount of fuel in a furnace. First, put any fuel and anything you want to smelt in the furnace. Then, when the fuel is almost out, quit and log in again. The timer for the fuel should have restarted, but you will still have the smelted product from the furnace. This can be used for large-scale projects and infinite smelting. The only problem is you need to constantly log in and out if the fuel does not last long.

Trivia

File:2012-01-04 18.52.49.png

Torch placed onto a furnace

  • Furnaces function as multiple devices combined into one block. Furnaces are really Bloomeries and blast furnaces (for smelting ores), an oven (for baking and cooking), a charcoal pit (for the charring of wood) and a kiln (for baking of clay).
  • In an early version of the game, you can have the same effect as a furnace by dropping items on the ground and then burning them with flint and steel. This was the only way to smelt ores.
  • 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 at a low temperature.
  • Lava has a one time use when used as fuel. It is usually used to smelt a large amount of ores at once. As of 1.3 you get the bucket back.
  • A torch can be placed onto the front of the furnace by placing a stairs block one spot forward and to the left of the furnace and using the torch on the stairs. This also works with crafting tables. Torches and buttons can also be placed on furnaces by allowing vines to grow over the furnace and placing the button or torch on the vine. This destroys the vine the torch or button is placed on.
  • Furnaces can be used as an early XP farm, requiring only cobblestone and fuel to produce XP.

See also

References

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