When playing Minecraft on survival mode, ores are going to be very important. Players will spend a ton of time looking for ore, mining ore, smelting ore, and then crafting weapons, armor, and tools with the product, but that time can be cut down a bit. The Blast Furnace item is capable of smelting ores at twice the rate a regular furnace can, but comes with the added drawback of not being able to smelt anything else. This means if players want to cook food or smelt a cactus to make green dye, they'll need to use a furnace instead of the Blast Furnace.

For ores that can be found in great quantity such as Iron Ore, a Blast Furnace can be super helpful in cutting down the waiting time for the ore to smelt. Minecraft players need ore and ingots for a lot of things, so there's really no reason not to upgrade to a Blast Furnace.

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In order to craft this block, players will need to get ahold of five iron ingots, three smooth stone, and one furnace and then arrange them on the crafting table in the order showed below. Iron ingots are obviously produced by smelting iron ore, and smooth stone can be obtained by smelting stone, which in turn is obtained by smelting cobblestone. Finally, just pick up the furnace used to do all that other smelting and combine them together to create a Blast Furnace.

It's important to note that Blast Furnaces burn through resources twice as fast as a normal furnace, but since the output is also twice as fast, the same number of resources are used per item. In other words, a normal furnace can smelt eight items with a single piece of coal, and a Blast Furnace will smelt eight items with a single piece of coal as well, just twice as fast. This is useful if trying to collect lots of iron to create an iron golem.

Finally, Blast Furnaces also serve as a job site block, allowing a villager without a job to claim it and become an Armorer. As an Armorer, villagers can trade armor in return for emeralds, offering yet another way to obtain better gear. This works especially well if players can earn emeralds by trading wheat or other produce with farmers and then use the emeralds to get iron armor or better. For players wanting to cook food twice as fast, they will instead need to craft a Smoker block.

Minecraft is available now on Mobile, PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.

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