Tutorial:Automatic smelting

For a tutorial on smelting items manually, see Tutorial:Smelting.

The purpose of this tutorial is to teach how to smelt items automatically, without having to put them in and get them out manually. You will need hoppers, furnaces, and at least three chests. Additionally, furnaces can be replaced with smokers for faster cooking of food or blast furnace for faster smelting of ore or nuggets.

Semi-automatic furnace

I
F
O
Semi-Automatic Smelter.
I is Input (smeltables)
F is fuel
O is output.

This semi-automatic design uses hoppers, and is not too difficult to build and is inexpensive.

You will need 3 chests, 3 hoppers, and 1 furnace. The raw ingredients for this would be 8 cobblestone, 15 iron ingots, and 12 logs of wood (48 planks).

Build instructions

See below for a step-by-step guide on how to make this semi-automatic furnace design. Sneak to attach blocks to each block that has an inventory, such as attaching a hopper to a chest. Otherwise you will open the block instead of placing the block. Connecting a second smelting module right next to the first smelting module (making sure that all the chests in both modules become double chests) will make the smelter twice as fast.

  • Step 1: Place down a chest on the ground. (This will be the chest in which the smelted/cooked items will be put)
  • Step 2: Attach a hopper to the chest.
  • Step 3: Place the furnace on top of the hopper.
  • Step 4: Place one hopper on the top and 1 hopper on the side (left, right, front, or back) of the furnace. (The top one will insert the items into the furnace, which get smelted / cooked; The hopper on any side-face inputs fuels into the furnace)
  • Step 5: Place a chest on top of each hopper attached to the furnace.

Variations: You may choose to add levers to control the hoppers. Switching off the bottom hopper stops it from taking items out, allowing you to collect the experience from smelting them. Switching off the top hopper allows you to fill the top chest with various items, then eventually smelt them all in one go, reducing the fuel waste normally incurred by smelting partial stacks. The fuel hopper on the side never needs to be switched off. This design also synergizes well with copper golems if you replace the output chest with a copper one.

Multiplayer: On servers that have chest and furnace protections, you may have to unlock these before the hoppers are able to interact with them.

Videos

Automatic item sorting furnace

This fully-automatic build allows for seamless integration into an existing item sorting system, and runs automatically in the background as a predetermined item is collected before reaching its final storage location.

Items collected by the item filter will be smelted by an internal furnace, collected by a set of hoppers, and transported back to the main hopper line with a dropper item elevator to be transported to a chest or storage system. This design will require the occasional addition of coal or fuel, when its corresponding chest runs low, to keep the furnace running.

The following items can be smelted with this automatic furnace design:

Tiny fuel generator

Charcoal

Tiny Charcoal Generator 

View at: Tutorial:Automatic smelting/Tiny Charcoal Generator [edit]

This design lets a furnace producing charcoal feed its product back into the furnace to fuel itself. It needs to be started off with one piece of charcoal (or for that matter, any fuel) in the chest. If more than 5-6 stacks of wood are available, another chest for input can be placed atop the upper hopper. Note that this design uses a comparator, which requires access to nether quartz.

The chest will not start receiving charcoal until both the furnace and the hopper feeding it fuel (level 2) are full. However, the hopper can be "stuffed" with four non-fuel items in its last four slots, as long as you leave the first slot open for fuel. Then the chest will start getting charcoal after two stacks of charcoal are produced, which will require 2-1⁄4 stacks of wood.

See the following video for an example of how to make this:

Bamboo

Large smelters

These smelters are designed to be extendable and handle large amounts of items.

Mumbo Jumbo's design

This design can scale up to 12 furnaces and can operate, at most, 12 times faster.

Note: The video tutorial misses the redstone wall torches needed as part of the AND gate. They are visible in Layer 2 of the blueprints below.

  • Size: 7x7x8 (WxHxL, 5 furnaces) to 7x7x15 (WxHxL, 12 furnaces)
  • Furnaces: 5–12 (operating in parallel)
  • Speed: 5–12 items every 10 seconds (0.5–1.2 items/second)
  • Fuel: Any fuel (including lava buckets)

Principle of operation

A hopper line takes smeltable items from the input chest and fills the hoppers immediately below them with one item each, disabling them via the comparators once filled. When all secondary hoppers are filled with one item, the redstone AND gate below enables all secondary hoppers at once to push the items into the furnaces. The cycle then repeats until the input chest is empty. A minecart with hopper runs back and forth along powered rails collecting smelted items and placing them into the output chest via on more hoppers.

  • Simple chests and hoppers feed fuel directly into the furnaces
  • Due to differences in redstone behavior between Java Edition and Bedrock Edition, you may need to alter the repeater delays for the AND gate (see blueprint below)
  • The distribution of items is inconsistent at the beginning of a filling cycle so longer lines are better distributed and more efficient
  • When used with lava buckets, the empty buckets will build up alongside smelted items in the output chest
  • When the input chest is empty, all the hoppers are enabled allowing the remaining smeltable items to move through the system
  • An additional output hopper is required if using 6–12 furnaces, or smelted items will build up in the minecart

Blueprints (minimal design)

  • The lowest chest (Layer 1) receives smelted items out
  • The middle chests (Layer 4) feeds fuel in
  • The single chests (Layer 5) are part of the mechanism and do not need filling
  • The highest chest (Layer 7) feeds smeltable items in
  • In Java Edition, set the repeaters in Layer 2 to two ticks delay; in Bedrock Edition, leave them at the default one tick
  • Alternating trapped chests and chests may be substituted by sideways chests in layer 5, as shown in these blueprints
  • Set the repeater in Layer 6 to four ticks delay (labeled with MiscSprite number-4.png: Sprite image for number-4 in Minecraft)
  • Leave all other repeaters at the default one tick
  • Place the redstone torches in Layer 4 vertically (shown as BlockSprite redstone-torch.png: Sprite image for redstone-torch in Minecraft)
  • Place the stone slabs in Layer 4 as top slabs (shown as BlockSprite stone-slab-top.png: Sprite image for stone-slab-top in Minecraft)
Video design (5 furnaces)
Layer 1
Layer 2
Layer 3
Layer 4
Layer 5
Layer 6
Layer 7
Materials
Name Total Layer 1 Layer 2 Layer 3 Layer 4 Layer 5 Layer 6 Layer 7
Stone 52 19 7 11 1 12 2 -
Hopper 22 1 - 5 5 5 6 -
Redstone Torch 21 - 5 10 5 - 1 -
Redstone Dust 17 - 10 - 6 1 - -
Chest 14 2 - - 5 5 - 2
Redstone Repeater 11 - 5 5 - - 1 -
Redstone Comparator 6 - - - - 5 1 -
Powered Rail 6 - 6 - - - - -
Stone Slab 5 - 5 - - - - -
Furnace 5 - - 5 - - - -
Block of Redstone 1 1 - - - - - -
Minecart with Hopper 1 - 1 - - - - -
Maximum working design (12 furnaces)
Layer 1
Layer 2
Layer 3
Layer 4
Layer 5
Layer 6
Layer 7
Materials
Name Total Layer 1 Layer 2 Layer 3 Layer 4 Layer 5 Layer 6 Layer 7
Stone 113 45 14 25 1 26 2 -
Hopper 51 2 - 12 12 12 13 -
Redstone Torch 49 - 12 24 12 - 1 -
Redstone Dust 38 - 24 - 13 1 - -
Chest 28 2 - - 12 12 - 2
Redstone Repeater 25 - 12 12 - - 1 -
Redstone Comparator 13 - - - - 12 1 -
Powered Rail 13 - 13 - - - - -
Stone Slab 12 - 12 - - - - -
Furnace 12 - - 12 - - - -
Block of Redstone 1 1 - - - - - -
Minecart with Hopper 1 - 1 - - - - -

ilmango's design

This design is more recent and more efficient due to the new blocks. It can operate either 23 or 46 times faster than a single furnace at most.

  • Size: 4x7x28 (WxHxL)
  • Furnaces: 23 (operating in parallel)
  • Speed: 23 items every 10 seconds (2.3 items/second)
  • Fuel: Any fuel (including lava buckets)

Principle of operation

There are two primary hopper lines connected horizontally (one for fuel, one for smeltable items) above disabled secondary hoppers which feed the furnaces. Items move along each primary line until they reach the end, activating the comparator and disabling the primary line while enabling the secondary one. This moves single fuel or smeltable items into the furnaces via the secondary hoppers, distributing them evenly. By using a line length of 23 hoppers/furnaces, this process occurs every 10 seconds, matching the time to smelt one item in a furnace.

  • When used with lava buckets, the empty buckets will build up alongside smelted items in the output chest
  • The hopper lines will stop independently once the furnaces and hoppers feeding them are full, but will continue automatically once there are free slots again
  • This design may be doubled by building two symmetric lines fed from common input chests giving 46 furnances operating in parallel (refer to the video)
  • If non-fuel items are placed in the fuel chest, the machine will clog and you'll need to remove the incompatible items from the secondary hoppers/furnaces
  • This is also true if placing non-smeltable items in the smelting input chest

Blueprint (minimal design)

  • The lowest chest (layer 2) receives smelted items out
  • The middle chest (layer 5) feeds fuel in
  • The highest chest (layer 6) feeds smeltable items in
  • The hopper lines load the furnaces with one smeltable item and one fuel item approximately every 10 seconds
  • Repeaters should have the default delay (1 tick) unless labeled with MiscSprite number-3.png: Sprite image for number-3 in Minecraft — set these to 3 ticks


Layer 1
Layer 2
Layer 3
Layer 4
Layer 5
Layer 6
Layer 7

Materials

Name Total Layer 1 Layer 2 Layer 3 Layer 4 Layer 5 Layer 6 Layer 7
Stone 119 18 9 16 32 3 33 8
Hopper 119 - 23 23 48 25 - -
Redstone Dust 97 - 8 9 - 51 9 20
Redstone Repeater 16 - 8 - - 3 1 4
Redstone Comparator 2 - - - 1 1 - -
Redstone Torch 4 - - - 1 1 2 -
Chest 6 - 2 - - 2 2 -
Furnace 23 - - 23 - - - -

Mysticat's design

1man1game's design

JC Playz's design


Video

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