Minecraft Smelting Guide: Fuel Efficiency & Furnaces
Furnace vs blast furnace vs smoker vs campfire — smelting times, fuel values (lava bucket smelts 100 items), XP banking, and automation with hoppers.
FAQ
What is the best fuel in Minecraft?
What's the difference between furnace, blast furnace, and smoker?
Do furnaces give XP in Minecraft?
Furnace vs blast furnace vs smoker vs campfire
| Station | Time per item | What it accepts | Fuel |
|---|---|---|---|
| Furnace | 10 s (200 ticks) | Everything | Any fuel |
| Blast furnace | 5 s (100 ticks) | Ores, raw metal, and metal gear only | Any fuel (burns 2× fast) |
| Smoker | 5 s (100 ticks) | Food only | Any fuel (burns 2× fast) |
| Campfire | 30 s | Food only, 4 slots at once | None — free cooking |
Specialized furnaces burn fuel at twice the rate but smelt twice as fast — fuel-per-item is identical to a normal furnace, they only save time.
Fuel efficiency, ranked
| Fuel | Items smelted |
|---|---|
| Lava bucket | 100 (bucket returned) |
| Block of coal | 80 — more than the 9 coal it crafts from (72) |
| Dried kelp block | 20 |
| Blaze rod | 12 |
| Coal / charcoal | 8 |
| Logs, planks, wooden tools | 1.5 each |
Efficiency notes: craft coal into blocks in bulk — 9 coal worth 72 items becomes a block worth 80. A dried-kelp auto-smelter is self-fueling: kelp smelts into dried kelp, which crafts into blocks that power the furnace.
The hidden XP bank
Every item you smelt stores XP inside the furnace — even if a hopper pulls the output instantly. The stored XP drops the first time a player removes output manually. A cactus or kelp smelter run for days becomes a massive one-shot XP dump — that’s how “furnace XP banks” work.
Automating it
Three hoppers make any furnace automatic:
- Top hopper → feeds input items
- Side hopper → feeds fuel
- Bottom hopper → pulls output (to a chest, or into an item sorter)
An array of 8–16 blast furnaces on hopper lines is the standard “super smelter” for bulk ore processing.
What to read next
- Crafting Basics — all the station blocks
- Essential Recipes — what to craft before your first furnace
- How to Find Diamonds — the ore worth smelting
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