How to use a Minecraft Blast Furnace

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Minecraft Blast Furnace: Everything you need to know.

Minecraft Blast Furnace - a variety of ores around a blast furnace
(Image credit: Mojang)

Trying to work out how to use a Minecraft Blast Furnace? This handy block-based forge lets you smelt all sorts of junk, but unlike the regular furnace variant, it's twice as fast, letting you break down items and ore into new materials for crafting. However, it can only smelt ore and items made from iron, gold, or chainmail—you'll need to roast your chickens elsewhere!

Blast Furnaces are super useful if you mine a lot of ore or regularly need to break down items into their respective materials. If you've got spare resources lying around, why not make a block that can do a faster job than your tired old regular furnace?

In this Minecraft Blast Furnace guide, I'll go through everything you need to know to build this essential workstation, as well as how to use it so you can get smelting those extra materials.  

How to craft a Minecraft Blast Furnace

(Image credit: Mojang)

Crafting the Blast Furnace is relatively easy, provided you have the required ingredients—and even then, they're not particularly difficult to get hold of. You need one Furnace, five Iron Ingots, and three pieces of Smooth Stone. 

The standard Furnace can be made with eight pieces of Cobblestone, which is pretty common. If you're at a loss, just dig down for a bit, and you'll come across some soon enough. 

To get the Smooth Stone, you need to cook Cobblestone twice. The first time it turns to Stone, and then to Smooth Stone the second. 

The most difficult ingredient you need is the Iron Ingots. The difficulty in acquiring iron ore will come down to how lucky you are with your world and terrain. You can often see Iron Ore in shallow caves, though in some cases, you may have to mine a bit further to locate some. Once you've found the ore, you can smelt it into Iron Ingots. If you happen to get lucky with treasure chests, you can also make one by combining nine Iron Nuggets, but that's more hassle than it's worth, frankly. 

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How to use a Minecraft Blast Furnace

(Image credit: Mojang)

Using a Blast Furnace is more or less the same as using a regular Furnace. Just pop some fuel in the bottom-left section, and follow it with the smeltable item in the top-left section. Remember, Blast Furnaces can only smelt things. But, while they do so at twice the speed, it uses fuel at twice the rate too. But can you really put a price on the time you'll save? 

The most common way to use the Blast Furnace is to smelt down blocks of ore into ingots, but you can also use them to melt down weapons, tools, and armour. Everything else has to go through a normal Furnace.

The Minecraft Blast Furnace is also the 'job' block for the armorer profession within a village.