What is better than a furnace in Minecraft 1.19 update?

Minecraft is one of the most unique games in the world, with millions of active players every month. The most impressive aspect of the game is that it has stood the test of time, competing with the most graphically intensive games over the last decade, and is still widely known as one of the greatest games of all time.

Minecraft’s primary focus has always been on carrying out almost every function using blocks. Many of these are survival functions, like chopping down wood, making crafting benches using wooden planks, and making anvils using blocks of iron. This article, however, will talk about the furnace block, its limits, and its successors as of Minecraft 1.19.

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Minecraft 1.19: The furnace and its alternatives

The furnace is a pretty straightforward block top. It is among the many different workbench blocks. Other workbench blocks include crafting tables, stone cutters, grindstones, smithing tables, and more.

The main purpose of a furnace is to cook food and smelt a selection of ores and minerals. Food items like raw cod, raw salmon, raw beef, raw pork, raw chicken, raw mutton, and more can be cooked in a furnace.

When a raw food item is cooked and consumed by the player, it recovers more hunger, increases saturation, and restores a larger chunk of health as compared to the amount a raw food item restores. Additionally, a raw food item, if consumed, can cause “food poisoning” to the player. This effect lasts around 30 seconds.

Players can make their own furnace using any stone variant like blackstone or cobblestone. All they need are eight blocks of the variant placed on a crafting bench with the central crafting slot left blank.

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What is better than a furnace?

There are two blocks that are objectively better than a furnace. However, unlike the regular furnace, both of them only focus on one of the former’s two functions.

1) The Blast Furnace

The blast furnace is a variant of the furnace that can only be used to smelt or “refine” raw ores and minerals. It is twice as fast as a regular furnace when smelting. Additionally, it can be used as the armor villager’s job site block in a village.

Though the blast furnace may be faster, it is also harder to craft. Unlike a regular furnace, which requires just a few blocks of cobblestone, the blast furnace requires five iron ingots and a smooth stone. Many players prefer the regular furnace due to the fact that it is easier to craft.

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2) The Smoker

The smoker is a block that serves as an upgraded variant of the regular furnace in relation to cooking food items. Items like raw pork, raw mutton, raw beef, and raw chicken can be cooked in a smoker.

Similar to a blast furnace, smokers smelt food at twice the speed of a regular furnace. Additionally, they need wood logs to craft and deserve as the job site block of the butcher villager.

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As for which block is better, most people (especially players who have been playing Minecraft for quite some time) will insist that the regular furnace is better than both the smoker and the blast furnace. However, for the sake of comparison, it would be prudent to rank the blast furnace as the better out of the two.

Minecraft players can always grow food that does not need to be cooked or use fire-based weapons, tools, and enchantments to make mobs drop cooked food. However, the blast furnace does an amazing job at smelting loads of ores and saves a large amount of time.