4 best coal alternatives in Minecraft

Coal is one of the most important items in Minecraft. It is one of the first resources players gather since it allows them to smelt items in a furnace and create torches to see better in dark caves. While you cannot replace coal with any other item to make torches for survival, you can use alternatives for it in a furnace.

Here are some of the best coal alternatives that can be used as fuel in Minecraft.

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List of 4 best alternatives to coal as a fuel in Minecraft

1) Bamboo

Bamboo can be farmed and used as fuel (Image via Sportskeeda Gaming || Mojang Studios)

Bamboo might be the least efficient fuel to be used in a furnace, but it can be a great coal alternative if players create a farm for it in Minecraft. One bamboo can only smelt 0.25 of an item and can only burn for 2.5 seconds. Hence, four of them are required to burn one full item.

However, a large bamboo farm is quite easy to create, and it can produce multiple stacks of the plant within a few hours. All those stacks of bamboo can then be used to smelt items with ease. Players can simply place one stack of bamboo and then quickly place another when it runs out.

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2) Blaze Rod

Blaze rods can burn for a long time (Image via Sportskeeda Gaming || Mojang Studios)

Blaze rods are another great alternative to coal, as they can smelt 12 items at once while burning for 120 seconds. Since it has more burning capacity than coal, it can be a great alternative.

To get loads of blaze rods, players can create a blaze spawner farm. Blaze spawners can be found in Nether Fortresses, which can be enclosed from all sides so that blaze spawners inside the box and fall to the killing chamber, where they can be killed.

Blaze rods can be used not only as a coal alternative for fuel, but also to brew potions and create eyes of ender.

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3) Lava

Lava is a dangerous but most efficient coal alternative (Image via Sportskeeda Gaming || Mojang Studios)

Lava is one of the best coal alternatives as a fuel in Minecraft. Since lava is the hottest resource in the game, one bucket of it can easily burn 100 items at once. Many players create a lava farm to get infinite lava for fuel in a furnace.

A lava farm can be made using pointed dripstone and a cauldron, as shown in the picture above. Players must place lava on top of the entire farm and a pointed dripstone on the underside of the block right below the lava. Once this is done, lava will start dripping from the pointed dripstone.

If cauldrons are placed underneath the pointed dripstone, the container will fill up with lava, which can be scooped using a bucket. The main trick is that lava in the upper part of the farm will not deplete, making it an infinite lava farm to be used as fuel.

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4) Wood

Wood can also burn when players run out of coal (Image via Sportskeeda Gaming || Mojang Studios)

Since coal has been such an important and somewhat obvious fuel in Minecraft, many players might not even realize that they can burn wood in Minecraft to smelt items as well. Since wood is normally used as a building block, not many people burn it to smelt, but it can be a great alternative if one cannot find coal in the wilderness.

Wood is one of the most abundant resources in Minecraft. Any tree in the Overworld can be chopped, and its blocks can be smelted in a furnace. One wood block of any kind will only smelt 1.5 items. Hence, players must burn quite a lot of wood to smelt a decent amount of items in a furnace.

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