Minecraft is quite literally the most popular game of all time. It has been played by more people than any other game on the planet. Given the game’s appeal to our creativity, as well as its incredibly fun and engaging survival mode, it is no surprise that this game is so wildly popular.
Naturally, there are plenty of tricks and tips in Minecraft to help you survive and thrive in the world. Today, we plan on covering the most efficient and best fuel sources for your furnaces.
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Top 7 Best Fuel Sources in Minecraft
One of the most fundamental mechanics of the game is keeping your furnaces going to smelt new materials. Whether you’re a new player or a veteran of the game, you can’t escape the need for fuel.
As there’s so much to do in this game, you’ll want to spend as little time as possible worrying about gathering fuel and micro-managing your furnaces. To that end, using the most readily available and efficient fuel sources will ensure you have plenty of smelted items to work with when you return home.
If you’re brand new to the game, take a brief moment to go over our quick tutorial on how smelting works. Otherwise, feel free to skip ahead to our list below.
Smelting in Minecraft Overview
If you’re new to the game, it’s imperative you fully understand how this critical mechanic works.
Let’s first discuss what smelting is and how it works in Minecraft. In the game, players can craft a block called a furnace. Furnaces are made by arranging 8 blocks of cobblestone, cobbled-deepslate, or blackstone on the outer edges of a crafting table, leaving one empty space in the middle. Crafting this recipe will reward you with one single furnace that can be placed down.
After placing it down, you can right-click it to enter into its interface. Doing this allows you to place an item–such as iron ore, for example–on the top space. You can then place a fuel source down in the bottom space to power it. The furnace will turn on and begin to smelt or cook the item you placed inside. This is a fundamental mechanic of the game, and it’s one every player needs to know about.
All sorts of items can be obtained using furnaces. You can cook raw food to make them fill up more of your hunger bar, for example. You can also smelt a wide variety of different ore types inside of a furnace, which is needed to upgrade your tools, weapons, and armor. As you can imagine, smelting is very, very important. But just what are the best items you can use as fuel in your furnaces…?
Wooden Planks
The first and easiest to obtain fuel source in the game is wooden planks. Wooden planks are one of the most basic items in the enter game, and they are needed to kickstart your adventure when you first create a new survival world. Wooden planks can be gathered by first chopping down any tree. Then, place the wooden logs in your crafting table and you’ll get a total of 4 planks for every wooden log!
Wooden planks are far from being an efficient fuel source time-wise. Every single wooden plank can only smelt 1.5 items. The benefit to using them, however, is their abundance and how easy they are to obtain. Trees are basically everywhere in the overworld and require little effort to chop down.
Once you get a log, instead of placing it right into a furnace to smelt the same number of items, you can craft it into x4 planks. This gives you quadruple the fuel supply! While you will want to move on to another fuel source later on in the game, wooden planks are perfect for the early game due to their previously mentioned ease of access and abundance.
Charcoal
The next fuel source on our list is charcoal. Charcoal is an item that looks and acts very similarly to coal. It even shared the exact same texture at one point in the past. Unlike coal, however, you do not need to go underground to get it. Charcoal can be obtained by smelting one log into the top space of a furnace instead of the bottom space (which would consume it as fuel).
Once the furnace is finished making you your charcoal, the charcoal can be put back into the furnace as fuel to smelt up to 8 items! This is noticeably better than the wooden planks mentioned earlier. And since you can also acquire charcoal from the same source–trees/wooden logs–that makes them just as easy to obtain. The only downside is that you need to smelt them in a furnace first, but that is no big deal.
Again, like the wooden planks, these are meant to be an early game source of fuel. They are excellent if you don’t feel like braving the mines for coal, which is more dangerous to obtain. Once you get some better armor and equipment, then you can take on some more challenging mobs and areas of the game to get some even better fuel sources…
Blaze Rods
Blaze Rods are the next one up on our list of the top 7 best fuel sources in Minecraft! These are a mid-game item that can be obtained by venturing inside The Nether, a Hellish world containing creepy monsters and loads of valuable resources. Blaze rods are dropped from Blazes, a flying enemy that shoots out balls of fire at players. They spawn naturally inside Nether Fortresses, a naturally generating structure in The Nether.
Blaze rods can be used as a fuel source and can smelt exactly 12 items for each and every rod. This is a +50% increase from the charcoal mentioned earlier. Due to how difficult blazes are to kill (especially in groups), this fuel source can be a hassle to get a hold off. It also takes time to obtain. Most blazes will only drop 0-1 blaze rods each time that they are killed. Because of this, you might want to skip this fuel source…
…Unless you know how to farm them effectively. On YouTube, there is an abundance of tutorials on how to create an effective blaze rod farm. I recommend this one published by Minecraft YouTuber wattles. Additionally, if you have a sword enchanted with Looting III, it will increase the number of blaze rods dropped from blazes. The number goes from 0-1 per blaze all the way up to 0-4 per blaze!
Block of Coal
The next one on our list is blocks of coal! These are a fuel source that not many players use, but it’s still one of the most efficient means of smelting items in the game. One block of coal can be crafted with 9 pieces of coal taking up every single space in a 3×3 crafting grid. In order to obtain coal, the most effective way of doing so is going deep unground and mining it the old-fashioned way.
Blocks of coal are great because just one can smelt up to 80 items! This is an insane increase over the 12 items that blaze rods can smelt at once. Coal in general is fairly easy to obtain and can be commonly found above ground. If you go deep into the mines, just be warned that monsters are abundant there. Coal is one of the easiest blocks to locate, but getting large quantities of it at once can be time-consuming.
Since coal blocks can be stacked up to 64 in a furnace, this means your furnace can smelt up to 5,120 items before it needs to be refueled. Despite all the pros of using blocks of coal, I would recommend you only use this fuel source if you have a pickaxe with the Fortune III enchantment. This will increase the amount of coal dropped per ore from 1 to 1-4! Using this makes getting coal much less grindy.
Lava Bucket
For our next fuel source on the list, we’ve got a very strange one… lava buckets! Lava buckets have been a fuel source in the game for an incredibly long time. But despite this are rarely ever used by players. All you need to do to get a bucket of lava is to create a bucket using three iron laid out in a V-shape along the crafting grid. After that, just go underground or to the Nether and right-click the lava with the bucket.
Lava is without a doubt the most fuel-efficient resource in the game. One bucket of lava can smelt exactly 100 items! This is an insane amount, and it makes you scratch your head why this source isn’t used more. The reason why is most likely due to the fact that buckets of lava cannot stack, and you need to manually load another bucket in after each and every use. Despite this, I still think this is one of the best sources.
Once you have access to The Nether, acquiring lava becomes incredibly easy. All you need to do is pop into The Nether with a few buckets and you can harvest as much lava as you need. This fuel source is a bit situational, and it’s best reserved for smelting large amounts of items at once. So if you’ve just come back from mining with lots of ores or have lots of food to cook, you should use lava to smelt them!
Bamboo
Up next is bamboo! Bamboo is a very interesting fuel source, as it’s simultaneously the absolute least effective fuel source while also being one of the absolute best fuel sources. But more on that in a minute. You can acquire some bamboo by finding them growing naturally in the wild. The most common place to find and collect them is in jungle biomes.
So, what is it about bamboo that makes them so interesting? Well for starters, one single piece of bamboo can only smelt a measly 0.25 items. This makes it one of the worst fuel sources when talking about pure efficiency. However… Bamboo can be easily grown and harvested by players. It is one of the fastest-growing plants in the game, and you can have a farm overgrown with them in no time at all.
This means that if you’ve got the redstone and the smarts to use it, you can set up an automatic bamboo farm that feeds into all of your furnaces! Creating a contraption like this will essentially give you an unlimited fuel source that requires no maintenance or re-stocking. All you need to do is set it up and you’re set for life! A tutorial by YouTuber TheGamedawg can be found by following the link posted here.
The downside to using bamboo is that you need to be close to your base/the site of the redstone contraption in order for it to be useful. So what fuel source should you use when you’re out in the wild…?
Dried Kelp Block
For our final entry on our list, we have dried kelp blocks as the best fuel source in Minecraft! Dried kelp blocks can be made when you harvest kelp out in the wild and then smelt it into dried kelp. Then, just crafted the dried kelp into blocks by laying it out in every single space in a 9×9 grid. This will give you one single kelp block, which can be stacked up to 64 blocks inside of a furnace.
One dried kelp block can be used to smelt 20 items. This is much smaller than a lava bucket, but unlike lava dried kelp blocks can be stacked up to 64. It is also much less than blocks of coal, but the upside of dried kelp blocks is that they are abundant and very easy to obtain. Kelp grows naturally in the overworld underwater. You can quickly and easily harvest them by breaking the bottom block, causing all the kelp above it to split off and float to the top for easy collection.
You can grow an underwater kelp garden and harvest MASSIVE amounts of kelp very quickly and easily. One downside to dried kelp blocks is the fact that they need to be smelted before each use, which adds another step to the crafting process. Overall, dried kelp blocks are a nice mix of having good fuel efficiency while also being easy to acquire/get set up.
I would consider bamboo to be the better option if you’re a player who doesn’t mind setting up redstone contraptions and stays close to their base most of the time. But for the player who ventures out away from home often, this one makes the better alternative in a lot of situations due to its versatility and ease of setup.
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