How to Make a Minecraft Auto Smelter in 2026

Standing next to a furnace waiting for your iron to cook is one of those little Minecraft chores that quietly eats up more time than it should. You drop things in, you wait, you come back, you pull everything out. It works, but it's a lot of standing around.

This design fixes that. It feeds items in automatically, keeps the fuel going, and drops everything finished into a chest the moment it's done - no redstone required. It works on every version of Minecraft too, which makes it one of those setups worth knowing no matter what you're playing on. If you do want a redstone-powered version that does even more, our top 5 Redstone farms guide has a great XP smelting setup that pairs really nicely with this one.

Furnace, smoker, or blast furnace?

The design works with all three, and picking the right one makes a real difference.

• Furnace handles everything - ore, food, sand, wood, you name it
• Smoker cooks food at twice the speed, but only food
• Blast furnace smelts ores and nuggets twice as fast, but won't touch food

If you're not sure which to build, a regular furnace is the safe pick. You can always swap it out later once you know what you're mostly processing.

What you'll need

• 3 chests
• 3 hoppers
• 1 furnace (or smoker, or blast furnace)

For the raw materials, you're looking at 8 cobblestone, 15 iron ingots, and 12 logs (48 planks). The iron is the main cost - those 15 ingots go into the three hoppers - but it's a one-time investment for something you'll use for the rest of your world. 💖

How to build it

One thing to know before you start: placing a hopper directly onto a block that has an inventory (like a chest or a furnace) requires you to sneak first. Hold Shift (or your crouch button) while placing, or you'll just open the block instead of attaching to it. It trips up almost everyone the first time.

Step 1. Place a chest on the ground. This is your output chest - it's where all your finished items will end up.

Step 2. Sneak and attach a hopper to the top of the chest. The hopper should point down into it.

Step 3. Place your furnace directly on top of the hopper.

Step 4. Sneak and attach one hopper to the top of the furnace, and one hopper to any side face. The top hopper feeds in whatever you want to smelt. The side hopper feeds in fuel.

Step 5. Place a chest on top of each of those two hoppers - one for your raw items, one for your fuel.

That's the whole build. Drop raw items into the top chest, drop fuel into the side chest, and the smelter takes care of everything else on its own. ✨

A few useful tweaks

Bank your XP. Smelting experience doesn't appear the moment items finish cooking - it builds up quietly inside the furnace and only releases when you pull something from the output slot. If you add a lever to the bottom hopper and switch it off, the furnace holds onto the finished items instead of pushing them into the chest. You can let a huge batch smelt away, come back later, flick the lever on, and grab one item to collect every level of stored XP all at once. It's a lovely trick.

Batch smelt to save fuel. A furnace wastes a small amount of fuel each time it stops and restarts partway through a stack. Adding a lever to the top hopper lets you fill the input chest completely before anything starts cooking - switch it on once it's full and the whole lot runs in one clean go.

Double up for double the speed. Two furnaces sitting side by side, each with their own hoppers but sharing a single input chest above and a single fuel chest on the side, roughly doubles how quickly things get done. It costs a bit more iron upfront, but if you're smelting in large batches it's absolutely worth it. 🌸

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Smelting by hand is one of those things you put up with for way longer than you should. Once you build this, you'll wonder how you ever went without it.

- Amy