Games like Minecraft can provide opportunities for players to make creations that are as complex and sprawling as they are fascinating. When you’re able to bring so many amazing ideas to life, it can be easy to forget some of the simpler but still useful items like charcoal. On your mind or not, it probably won’t be long before you need some whether you’re out adventuring or busy crafting your next masterpiece. Charcoal is a basic item that can be easily smelted from items readily available in the world, and it’s a crucial component in the creation of invaluable items like torches and campfires. When your journey gets disrupted by a need for charcoal, you’re luckily never too far away from being able to make yourself some!
Creating Charcoal
Time needed: 10 minutes.
To make Charcoal in Minecraft, you will need to smelt it by placing either logs or wood into a Furnace which will burn it up and transform it into Charcoal. It is primarily used as an alternative to Coal in the early game, and can be crafted into light emitting items like torches or campfires.
- Access a Furnace
The most important part of making charcoal is a furnace rather than any ingredient. You’ll need to either find one or craft one in order to make your own charcoal, but both of these approaches are pretty manageable. If you’d rather track one down, then it’s recommended you search in plains, desert, or savannah village biomes. Weaponsmiths in these areas are known to have furnaces you can use, although you can also find one in any igloo in the world.
If you don’t want to look for a furnace, then it can be just as easy to craft one yourself with a crafting table. A furnace is an item that will be useful even at the beginning of the game, so this may be the best option for many people. To craft a furnace, you’ll need to track down and mine either cobblestone, blackstone, or cobbled deepslate. When you find some, you’ll need to get at least 8 of the same type to have enough to make a furnace (this works for either Bedrock or Java editions, but you can actually use any combination of any stone in Java). After you’ve gathered your stone blocks, head to a crafting table and arrange them around the perimeter of the crafting grid. Doing this will provide you with a furnace!
- Find Wood
You’ll need to find any type of wood or log (stripped or not stripped) to make charcoal. You’ll also need to find a fuel source for every item you smelt. Fortunately, wood and logs are a few of the items in the game that can be used as a fuel source, so you can use the same type of wood as both your starting crafting material and fuel source for this activity. You can also use many other materials as fuel, such as coal or even lava. Each fuel type can smelt different amounts of material for each unit of fuel spent, but wood is a perfectly adequate fuel for crafting charcoal. You can use any variety of wood in any combination to do this (i.e. birch for starting material and oak for fuel, etc.), so just gather as much as you can of whatever type is around you. It will all look the same in a minute!
- Smelt Wood to Make Charcoal
Head to the closest furnace once you’ve gathered all the wood you’ll need for materials and fuel. Start by placing the wood you’re using as a starting material in the upper box, then follow by placing your fuel source into the bottom block. The furnace will start up immediately (indicated by flames) and produce your charcoal in just a few moments. You can even stack both your smelting material and fuel up to 64 units each, which allows you to produce charcoal in bulk. Now you have charcoal!
That’s everything you need to know about crafting charcoal in Minecraft! If you want to learn more about the game, be sure to check out the Minecraft section of our website.
Comments