How to Make a Blast Furnace in Minecraft

Current as of Minecraft Bedrock v26.1 and Java Edition 26.1 — Updated April 2026

TL;DR

• You need 5 iron ingots, 1 furnace, and 3 smooth stone to craft a blast furnace
• It smelts ores and metal items twice as fast as a regular furnace (5 seconds per item vs. 10 seconds)
• It only works on metals — no food, no stone, no wood
• You can also find one in a village armorer’s house or in trail ruins without crafting it
• It turns a nearby villager into an armorer and emits light level 13 when active

How to Make a Blast Furnace in Minecraft

The blast furnace is one of the most useful upgrades you can make in Minecraft. It smelts your ores twice as fast as a regular furnace — finishing each item in just 5 seconds instead of 10. If you spend a lot of time mining iron, gold, or copper, this block will save you a ton of waiting around.

This guide covers everything — the exact recipe, how to gather the materials step by step, platform support, item ID, give commands, what the blast furnace can and can’t do, and how it compares to a regular furnace and smoker.

Platform Support — Which Versions Have the Blast Furnace?

The blast furnace was introduced in the Village & Pillage update and is available on the following platforms:

In the Creative inventory, you can find the blast furnace under Functional Blocks in Java Edition (1.19.3+) and under Items in Bedrock Edition.

What You Need to Craft a Blast Furnace

Here are the three ingredients:

• 5 Iron Ingots
• 1 Furnace
• 3 Smooth Stone

That’s it. Simple on paper, but smooth stone takes a couple of extra steps to make if you don’t have it already. Let’s go through each material.

Step 1: Get Iron Ingots

You need 5 iron ingots total.

First, mine 5 iron ore blocks. Iron ore spawns underground in stone. You will find it in caves, ravines, on cliff faces, and almost anywhere you dig deep enough. Look for the grey stone with orange-brown specks — that’s iron ore.

Once you have the iron ore (or raw iron), smelt it in a regular furnace:

• Put the raw iron in the top slot
• Put any fuel in the bottom slot (coal, wood, charcoal all work)
• Wait for the iron ingots to appear on the right

You need 5 ingots, so make sure to smelt at least 5 pieces of raw iron.

If you’re struggling to find iron, check out our guide on how to find diamonds in Minecraft — the deep mining routes for diamonds will take you right through iron-rich zones too.

Step 2: Craft a Furnace

You need 1 furnace as an ingredient inside the blast furnace recipe. If you already have one, great. If not, here’s how to make it:

• Open your crafting table
• Fill every slot except the centre with cobblestone (8 cobblestone total)
• Collect the furnace

Cobblestone is made when water hits lava, or simply by mining stone blocks with any pickaxe.

You may want to make two furnaces at this point — one to keep using for general smelting, and one to put inside the blast furnace recipe.

Step 3: Make Smooth Stone

Smooth stone is the trickiest part because it needs two rounds of smelting.

Here’s the process:

Round 1 — Smelt cobblestone into stone:

• Put cobblestone in your furnace
• Use any fuel
• You get regular stone

Round 2 — Smelt stone into smooth stone:

• Put the regular stone into the furnace
• Smelt it again
• You now have smooth stone

You need 3 smooth stone for the blast furnace recipe, so smelt at least 3 cobblestone blocks twice over.

We have a full guide on how to make smooth stone in Minecraft if you want more details on this step.

Step 4: Craft the Blast Furnace

Now open your crafting table and arrange your materials like this:

[ Iron ]  [ Iron ]  [ Iron ]
[ Iron ]  [Furnace] [ Iron ]
[Smooth]  [Smooth]  [Smooth]

In plain terms:

• Top row: 3 iron ingots across all three slots
• Middle row: 1 iron ingot on the left, 1 furnace in the centre, 1 iron ingot on the right
• Bottom row: 3 smooth stone across all three slots

The blast furnace will appear in the result box. Drag it into your inventory.

Blast Furnace Item ID and Give Command

If you are in Creative mode or want to use commands, here are the item details for the blast furnace:

Give command — Java Edition:

/give @p blast_furnace 1

Give command — Bedrock Edition (PE, Xbox, PS, Switch):

/give @p blast_furnace 1 0

How to Use a Blast Furnace

Place the blast furnace down anywhere in your base. Right-click it (or press the use button on console/mobile) to open it.

The interface looks just like a regular furnace:

• Top slot — place the item you want to smelt (ore, raw metal, or metal gear)
• Bottom slot — place your fuel (coal, charcoal, lava bucket, wood, etc.)
• Right slot — your smelted result appears here

It works exactly like a normal furnace, just at double speed. Each item finishes smelting in 100 ticks (5 seconds) compared to 200 ticks (10 seconds) in a regular furnace. When active, the blast furnace emits a light level of 13 — one less than a torch.

What Can a Blast Furnace Smelt?

The blast furnace is a specialist tool. It only handles metals. Here is what it can and cannot smelt:

Can smelt:

• Iron ore and raw iron → iron ingots
• Gold ore and raw gold → gold ingots
• Copper ore and raw copper → copper ingots
• Iron tools, weapons, and armor → iron nuggets
• Gold tools, weapons, and armor → gold nuggets
• Copper tools and armor → copper nuggets
• Chainmail armor → iron nuggets
• Ancient debris → netherite scraps

Cannot smelt:

• Food — use a smoker or campfire instead
• Sand — no glass from a blast furnace
• Cobblestone or stone
• Wood or wooden items
• Diamond, emerald, redstone, lapis, or coal ore — these are not metals
• Anything non-metal

If you try to smelt food or stone in a blast furnace, nothing will happen. It simply won’t process those items.

Blast Furnace vs Regular Furnace vs Smoker

The blast furnace is the metal specialist. The smoker is the food specialist. The regular furnace handles everything at half the speed. For most mid-to-late game play you will want all three running side by side — a blast furnace for ores, a smoker for food, and a regular furnace for glass, bricks, and anything else.

Does the Blast Furnace Waste Fuel?

This is a very common question and the short answer is no — it does not waste fuel.

Yes, it burns fuel twice as fast. But it also smelts twice as fast. So the number of items you get per piece of fuel is exactly the same as a regular furnace. One piece of coal in a blast furnace smelts the same number of items as one piece of coal in a regular furnace — it just does it in half the time.

The only scenario where you can waste fuel is if the blast furnace finishes all its items while the fuel is still burning. In that case, the remaining burn time goes to waste — the same issue that affects regular furnaces too. The fix is automation with hoppers, which we cover in the pro tips section below.

What Happens If You Break a Blast Furnace Mid-Smelt?

Breaking a blast furnace while it is smelting is safe — you do not lose any items. The ore being smelted, any remaining fuel, and the item in the output slot all drop as item entities on the ground. Pick them up as you would any dropped item. The only thing lost is the smelting progress on the current item — it resets to zero.

One important note: in Java Edition you must use a pickaxe to break a blast furnace, or it will not drop itself. In Bedrock Edition, it drops even if broken by hand.

Can You Find a Blast Furnace Without Crafting It?

Yes — blast furnaces spawn naturally in two locations:

• Armorer houses in villages — the most reliable place. Any village can have one. Look for the house with a smithing or armoring setup.
• Trail ruins — less common, but blast furnaces can generate here too.

To pick one up, break it with a pickaxe. In Java Edition, breaking it without a pickaxe means it disappears and drops nothing. In Bedrock Edition it drops regardless of what tool you use. All items inside the furnace will drop on the ground when broken.

The Blast Furnace and the Armorer Villager

Here’s a useful bonus. If you place a blast furnace near an unemployed villager, that villager will take it as their job site and become an armorer.

Armorers are valuable traders. At higher trade levels, they can sell you enchanted diamond armor, which saves you a lot of resource grinding.

So even if you don’t use the blast furnace much for smelting, placing one in your village can upgrade your trading options. Pair this with your enchanting setup — check out our Minecraft enchanting table guide to get the most out of your gear.

Fuels You Can Use

The blast furnace accepts all the same fuels as a regular furnace:

• Coal and charcoal (most common)
• Wood blocks and planks
• Lava buckets (longest-burning single fuel — smelts 100 items)
• Bamboo (short burn time, but works)
• Blaze rods
• Any wooden item

Lava buckets are the most fuel-efficient single item. One bucket smelts 100 items. That said, coal is the most practical day-to-day choice since it’s easy to mine in bulk.

Pro Tips for Using Your Blast Furnace

Use hoppers to automate it — and eliminate fuel waste. A hopper on top feeds items in continuously. A hopper underneath pulls smelted items out into a chest. A third hopper on the side can feed fuel automatically. This setup prevents the furnace from ever sitting idle while fuel is still burning. The fuel gets used on the next item immediately. This is the cleanest solution to the fuel waste concern and takes only two or three hoppers and a chest to set up. Check out our automatic farm guide for ideas on building efficient resource setups around this.

Line up multiple blast furnaces. If you have a huge stack of iron to process, run several blast furnaces at once. They’re cheap to craft once you have iron flowing.

Don’t smelt gear purely for XP. Blast furnaces give half the XP per smelt. If you’re trying to level up through smelting, use a regular furnace. Better yet, build a proper XP mob farm for far better returns.

Recycle old iron, gold, and copper gear. Drop iron, gold, or copper tools and armor in the blast furnace to recover nuggets. Nine nuggets make one ingot, so it’s worth recycling gear you no longer need.

Efficiency Tip: A nearly broken iron chestplate gives you the same 1 iron nugget as a brand new full-durability one. Durability doesn’t affect the output. So only recycle gear you have genuinely no use for — don’t burn fuel on high-durability items just to get a single nugget back.

Use it as ambient lighting. An active blast furnace emits light level 13, one below a torch. If you are building a forge or smithing room, a row of active blast furnaces doubles as both functional smelters and ambient lighting that fits the industrial theme perfectly.

Performance note: If you’re running many automated furnaces and machines and noticing lag, especially after recent updates, check out our Minecraft v26.1 lag fix guide for solutions.

Quick Materials Checklist

Before you start, make sure you have:

• 5 raw iron (to smelt into ingots)
• 8 cobblestone (for the regular furnace)
• 3 cobblestone extra (to smelt into smooth stone — needs two rounds)
• Coal or wood for fuel during the prep smelting steps

Total raw resources needed from scratch: about 16 cobblestone, 5 iron ore, and some fuel.

Frequently Asked Questions

Final Thoughts

The blast furnace is one of the best quality-of-life upgrades you can make in mid-game Minecraft. It cuts your ore-smelting time in half, lets you recycle old metal gear, provides light level 13 as ambient lighting, and helps you get an armorer villager for high-level armor trades.

The recipe is straightforward once you know how to make smooth stone. Get your 5 iron ingots, your furnace, and your 3 smooth stone, and you’re done in minutes.

Once you’ve got the blast furnace sorted, your next goal might be heading to the Nether for ancient debris and netherite. Our guide on how to get to the Nether in Minecraft will help you take that step.