How to Make Charcoal in Minecraft From Any Log

Put a log in the top slot of a furnace, any fuel in the bottom, and it smelts into 1 charcoal. Every kind of log works, including stripped logs, wood blocks and the Nether’s crimson and warped stems. There’s no crafting recipe for charcoal.

This is the answer to the classic first-night problem: you’ve built a furnace and have plenty of wood, but you haven’t found a single coal ore. Charcoal fixes that in a couple of minutes.

Day-one method

1. Chop a stack of logs.
2. Turn 2 or 3 logs into planks for fuel. Each plank smelts 1.5 items.
3. Put the remaining logs in the furnace’s top slot and the planks below.
4. As the first charcoal comes out, move it into the fuel slot. From then on the furnace feeds itself.

That last step is the trick. One charcoal smelts 8 items, so 1 charcoal plus 8 logs gives you 8 charcoal back, a profit of 7 per cycle. With a bit of wood you never run out of fuel or light.

What to use it for

• Torches. One charcoal (or coal) on top of a stick gives 4 torches. This is the most common reason to make it.
• Fuel. Same burn time as coal in furnaces, smokers and blast furnaces.
• Campfires. A campfire needs coal or charcoal in the center.
• Fire charges. Blaze powder, gunpowder and coal or charcoal.

Where it falls short of coal

Charcoal and coal are interchangeable in nearly every recipe, with two exceptions:

• No block of coal. Nine charcoal won’t craft into a block of coal, so you can’t compress it for storage or for long furnace runs.
• No villager trades. Fishermen, armorers, toolsmiths and weaponsmiths buy coal for emeralds. They won’t take charcoal.

So once you’re mining regularly, you’ll end up with coal anyway. Keep charcoal as the early-game fallback and for torch-heavy trips. Our survival tips go through the rest of the first-night checklist.

Making it in bulk

If you build a tree farm, feed logs into a few furnaces with hoppers and you’ll have more fuel than you can use. A lava bucket smelts 100 items, and a block of coal 80, so those are better choices if you’re processing logs by the hundreds. For a cheaper start, simply run the self-feeding loop above in two or three furnaces at once.