Tutorial:Automatic 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.

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).

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.

mcspotlights's Basic design (view on YouTube)

Tutorial Français SUB English : Avanced automatic smelter - Four automatique avancé (view on YouTube)

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:

• Cobblestone
• Sand
• Iron ore
• Gold ore
• Netherrack
• Wet sponges
• Clay

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:

YouTube Video (view on YouTube)

YouTube Video (view on YouTube)

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

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.

YouTube Video (view on YouTube)

• 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)

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

• 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
  )

Name	Total	Layer 1	Layer 2	Layer 3	Layer 4	Layer 5	Layer 6	Layer 7
👁 Image Stone	52	19	7	11	1	12	2	-
👁 Image Hopper	22	1	-	5	5	5	6	-
👁 Image Redstone Torch	21	-	5	10	5	-	1	-
👁 Image Redstone Dust	17	-	10	-	6	1	-	-
👁 Image Chest	14	2	-	-	5	5	-	2
👁 Image Redstone Repeater	11	-	5	5	-	-	1	-
👁 Image Redstone Comparator	6	-	-	-	-	5	1	-
👁 Image Powered Rail	6	-	6	-	-	-	-	-
👁 Image Stone Slab	5	-	5	-	-	-	-	-
👁 Image Furnace	5	-	-	5	-	-	-	-
👁 Image Block of Redstone	1	1	-	-	-	-	-	-
👁 Image Minecart with Hopper	1	-	1	-	-	-	-	-

Name	Total	Layer 1	Layer 2	Layer 3	Layer 4	Layer 5	Layer 6	Layer 7
👁 Image Stone	113	45	14	25	1	26	2	-
👁 Image Hopper	51	2	-	12	12	12	13	-
👁 Image Redstone Torch	49	-	12	24	12	-	1	-
👁 Image Redstone Dust	38	-	24	-	13	1	-	-
👁 Image Chest	28	2	-	-	12	12	-	2
👁 Image Redstone Repeater	25	-	12	12	-	-	1	-
👁 Image Redstone Comparator	13	-	-	-	-	12	1	-
👁 Image Powered Rail	13	-	13	-	-	-	-	-
👁 Image Stone Slab	12	-	12	-	-	-	-	-
👁 Image Furnace	12	-	-	12	-	-	-	-
👁 Image Block of Redstone	1	1	-	-	-	-	-	-
👁 Image Minecart with Hopper	1	-	1	-	-	-	-	-

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.

YouTube Video (view on YouTube)

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

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

• 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

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

YouTube Video (view on YouTube)

YouTube Video (view on YouTube)

YouTube Video (view on YouTube)

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