Crafting unique items and tools is one of the many ways you can elevate your gaming experience in Minecraft. One such tool is the Minecraft Blast Furnace – an invaluable asset that offers twice the smelting speed of its traditional counterpart, the furnace. This article is designed to provide you with a step-by-step guide on how to get a Blast Furnace and effectively use it in your virtual Minecraft adventures.
What is the Blast Furnace?
The Minecraft Blast Furnace, often playfully referred to as the cousin of the smoker block, is a specialized block engineered for smelting ores, tools, and armor made predominantly of iron or gold. This block works at double the speed of a regular furnace, allowing you to smelt items much more quickly. Despite its impressive speed, it consumes fuel at the same rate as a regular furnace, offering you efficient smelting without added resource consumption.
It’s worth noting that the blast furnace’s use is not limitless. While it can smelt a variety of ores, it’s most effective for smelting iron and gold ores, and it can’t be used to cook food or smelt materials such as cobblestone, sandstone, glass, and brick. Regardless, the Minecraft Blast Furnace has a crucial role to play in your virtual world, available in both Minecraft Java 1.14 and Bedrock 1.11 versions.
Crafting the Blast Furnace
Crafting a Blast Furnace in Minecraft isn’t complex, but it does require some specific materials and an accurate pattern on the 3×3 crafting grid. You’ll need five iron ingots, a single furnace, and three smooth stones. Here’s how to arrange them in the crafting table:
- In the first row, place three iron ingots.
- In the second row, arrange one iron ingot, the furnace, and another iron ingot, in that order.
- The third row should contain the three smooth stones.
- It’s crucial to arrange the items exactly as described, or the crafting table won’t be able to transform them into a blast furnace. Once the blast furnace appears in the result box of the crafting table, move it to your inventory, and voila! You now have your Minecraft Blast Furnace, ready for use.
What is the Use of the Blast Furnace?
One of the primary advantages of using a Blast Furnace in Minecraft is its potential to save space and resources during mining sessions by allowing you to smelt ores on the spot. With the ability to smelt iron ore, gold ore, diamond ore, and emerald ore (the last two require a Silk Touch pickaxe), the blast furnace proves to be particularly useful.
However, the blast furnace serves more purposes beyond mere smelting. It also functions as a jobsite block for the armorer villager, who offers various trades. These trades involve buying items like emeralds, coal, iron ingots, lava buckets, and diamonds and selling items such as bells, shields, various armor types, including iron, chainmail, and diamond.
In addition, armor obtained through these trades comes with enchantment levels between 5 and 19, similar to those from an enchanting table. If you’re not happy with the enchantments, you can use enchanting tables or enchantment books to improve them, or a grindstone to remove them. Importantly, armor traded by the armorer does not have curse enchantments, so you don’t need to worry about undesirable effects like Curse of Vanishing or Binding.