Whether you’re just easing yourself into Minecraft or have been playing for a long time, one of the best things you can do for yourself in the game is to make a smoker. It’s very cheap and easy to make, and it’s great for cooking a lot of food in a short amount of time. In this guide, we give you the recipe for making a smoker in Minecraft and show you how to use one to your advantage in the game.
Also read: Minecraft Grindstone: How to Make and Use This Precious Item
Inside This Article
- What Does a Smoker Do in Minecraft?
- How to Make a Smoker in Minecraft
- Where to Find a Smoker in Minecraft
- How to Cook Using a Minecraft Smoker
- Furnace vs Blast Furnace vs Smoker: How Do They Differ?
- Is a Smoker Worth It in Minecraft?
What Does a Smoker Do in Minecraft?
You can use a smoker in Minecraft for a number of purposes, but primarily for cooking. Just like how you can use a blast furnace to smelt raw metals, ores, iron, and armor quickly, a smoker cooks food two times faster than a normal furnace. All you need is some fuel and a food item to cook, and you’re good to go. Plus, it can act as a light source and emit a light level of 13 when you power it up.
Aside from cooking raw food and lighting up a place, you can also use a Minecraft smoker as a job site block to change a villager’s profession into a butcher, as long as it hasn’t been claimed by another villager. Once you’ve turned an unemployed villager into a butcher, they can then trade food items with you, such as cooked chicken and beef. You can also sell all sorts of raw food items to these butchers and get emeralds in return.
Unorthodox uses for Minecraft smokers include using them for decoration for your builds and placing it under a note block so that it produces a bass drum sound.
How to Make a Smoker in Minecraft
Making a smoker in Minecraft’s Bedrock Edition only requires four main steps — three if you have already made a crafting table. We discuss those steps in detail below:
1. Have a Crafting Table
Prepare a crafting table before everything else. A crafting table is a utility block in the game that lets you make and repair all sorts of stuff using a 3×3 crafting menu. Without a crafting table, you can only make items using a 2×2 crafting grid. You can’t really make much with that type of crafting grid alone, and certainly not a smoker.
If you’ve been in the Minecraft world for a long time, chances are you already have a crafting table. But if you’re still new to the game and haven’t had the chance to make one yet, we show you how in this easy guide:
- Gather four pieces of wood planks. It can be any type — acacia, oak, spruce, etc.
- If you don’t have wood planks, you can get some by chopping down a tree and placing one or several logs of that tree in the 2×2 crafting grid. Make sure to place the logs in the upper left corner slot of the grid. One piece of log yields four wood planks.
- Access the 2×2 grid via the rightmost three-dot icon on the hotbar.
- Place the four wood planks on the grid. The separate slot to the right of the interface should yield the crafting table.
- Transfer the crafting table to your storage interface.
2. Find or Craft a Furnace
The first thing you need to do to make a smoker in Minecraft is to get a furnace. You can find one by going to a weaponsmith’s house in the plains, savanna, snowy tundra, desert, taiga, or snowy taiga biomes. There’s also one in every igloo. When you find a furnace, hit it with a pickaxe to steal it.
However, if you’re not in the mood to go searching for a furnace, you can simply make one from scratch. To craft a furnace, you’ll need eight cobblestones, blackstones, or cobbled deepslates. In Minecraft Bedrock Edition, note that you can use only one of these stone variants. Of the three, you might want to go for cobblestone, as it’s very common in the Minecraft overworld. You can only find Blackstone in the Nether. Cobbled deepslates, on the other hand, can only be mined from deepslate, which you can find underground and is considerably harder to break.
Once you have everything you need, you’ll then have to launch the 3×3 crafting grid and place all eight blocks in there. Make sure to leave the box at the very center empty, like in this example:
A furnace will then appear in the output slot to the right. Drag it to your inventory, and you’re good to go!
3. Gather Four Pieces of Wood
Next, you need to gather four pieces of wood to make a smoker in Minecraft. The game is not choosy with the sort of wood you use for the process, so any type of wood, log, or stem will do. Plus, you can use any combination of wood when you’re making a smoker. You can easily find wood in forests, savanna villages, swamps, windswept hills, plains villages, snowy taiga, snowy plains, and/or taiga villages.
4. Craft a Smoker
Now that you have all the materials you need, you can begin crafting a smoker in Minecraft! To do so, place the crafting table by tapping on the block where you want it to stand. Doing so launches the 3×3 crafting grid. Now, you need to place the furnace and the wood you gathered in the grid. The furnace should be in the middle box. The slots directly above, below, to the left, and to the right of it should be occupied by one piece of wood each. Refer to this photo for guidance:
It’s important that you follow the exact pattern above. Otherwise, the crafting recipe won’t work, and you won’t have a smoker.
After you have placed all the necessary materials, you’ll see a smoker appear in the output slot to the right of the grid. Then, simply drag that to your inventory, and you now have a Minecraft smoker!
Where to Find a Smoker in Minecraft
If you’re not the crafty type, you can also look for naturally-spawning smokers in Minecraft. These items generate in butcher houses, which you can find in villages. Every Minecraft world has a village, but you won’t immediately find one when you spawn for the first time in the game. In Minecraft Bedrock Edition, there’s a 66.67% chance of finding a village within 500 blocks of your initial spawn point.
Once you have found a village, it’s all a matter of finding a butcher house by exploring. When you spot one, simply enter it, find a smoker, and steal it using a pickaxe.
How to Cook Using a Smoker in Minecraft
If you already used the furnace or blast furnace, you’re familiar with cooking via the smoker in Minecraft — the process is similar. But if not yet, here’s a step-by-step guide:
- From your hotbar, tap on the smoker to select it.
- Select the block where you want to set the smoker on.
- Power the smoker by placing fuel in the bottom block. Here are some of the types of fuel you can use with a smoker and the number of food items you can cook per unit:
Type of Fuel Burn Time Number of Food Items Cooked Stick 5 seconds 1 Acacia Plank 15 seconds 3 Birch Plank 15 seconds 3 Jungle Plank 15 seconds 3 Oak Plank 15 seconds 3 Spruce Plank 15 seconds 3 Wooden Trapdoor 15 seconds 3 Bee Nest 15 seconds 3 Ladder 15 seconds 3 Scaffolding 20 seconds 4 Boat 60 seconds 12 Charcoal 80 seconds 16 Coal 80 seconds 16 Blaze Rod 120 seconds 24 Dried Kelp 800 seconds 160 Block of Coal 800 seconds 160 Lava Bucket 1000 seconds 200 - Place the food item you want to cook in the top slot of the smoker. Some examples of food you can cook are raw chicken, mutton, beef, porkchop, potatoes, and all sorts of fish. The flame icon will then light up, which indicates your food is being cooked. You can monitor the progress through the arrow to the left of the output slot.
- Once the arrow has turned completely white, place the fuel back in your inventory so that you can save it for later. Keep in mind that a unit of fuel continues to burn even if you’re done cooking an item or if the upper slot is empty.
- Then, drag the cooked food item to your inventory.
Furnace vs Blast Furnace vs Smoker: How Do They Differ?
In the next section, we discuss what a furnace, a blast furnace, and a smoker are and what makes them different from one another.
Furnace
To understand the differences between a furnace, a blast furnace, and a smoker, let’s first discuss the most basic of the three — the furnace. A furnace in Minecraft can be used to cook food as well as smelt ores and all sorts of tools and blocks. You can practically place almost any solid block in a furnace to turn it into something else. Here are some of the items you can smelt with a furnace in Minecraft:
| Original Form | Smelted Form |
| Sand | Glass |
| Log, Stripped Log, Wood, or Stripped Wood | Charcoal |
| Sea Pickle | Lime Dye |
| Clay | Terracotta |
| Cobblestone | Stone |
| Stone | Smooth Stone |
| Cactus | Green Dye |
| Basalt | Smooth Basalt |
| Clay Ball | Brick |
| Netherrack | Nether Brick |
| Chorus Fruit | Popped Chorus Fruit |
To smelt these items, you’ll of course need fuel like coal, a wood plank, or a lava bucket.
You can also use a furnace to light up a place, use it as part of the wall, and place it under a note block to produce bass drum sounds. In addition, you can push it with a piston if you’re playing Minecraft Bedrock Edition.
Blast Furnace
A blast furnace is an upgraded type of furnace that can smelt items faster but cannot cook raw food. Unlike a regular furnace, there’s a shorter list of items you can smelt using a blast furnace. With it, you can only smelt raw ore, ore blocks, as well as gears that are made of gold, chainmail, or iron. Blast furnaces may smelt items twice as fast, but they also use up twice as much fuel as regular furnaces. So, if it’s fuel efficiency you’re after, you can go with either of the two. That’s because you’ll be able to smelt the same number of items per unit of fuel whether you’re using a plain furnace or a blast furnace.
You can also use an unclaimed blast furnace to change an unemployed villager’s profession to armorer. It’s also handy as a light source and can be placed under a note block to emit bass drum sounds. Like with regular furnaces, you can also use a piston to push a blast furnace.
Smoker
A smoker, on the other hand, is a type of furnace that can be used for cooking food. You can’t, however, use it to smelt items. That said, you can get more with it since it cooks twice as fast as a regular furnace. Plus, unlike a basic furnace, you can use a smoker as a job site block to turn an unemployed villager into a butcher. It does share a few characteristics with a furnace. For one, both items use the same amount of fuel to cook food. Plus, you can use both of them as light sources, and they both emit a light level of 13 when you add fuel to them.
Is a Smoker Worth It in Minecraft?
The short answer is yes — it certainly is. A Minecraft smoker is fairly easy to make, and all the materials you need to build one are very common in the overworld. Plus, they’re more fuel-efficient than regular furnaces, as they cook food items twice as fast while still using the same amount of fuel.
While you don’t really need to cook raw food before you can eat them in Minecraft (except for chicken, which gives you food poisoning in the game if you eat it raw), it would be more beneficial if you do. This is especially true with cooking meat. In general, cooked meat gives you nourishment of 1.6 and is the most nourishing out of all the ordinary food in Minecraft.
Steak (which is cooked beef), cooked pork chop, cooked mutton, and cooked salmon are the best foods you can eat in the game because they give a good amount of hunger points and saturation. For instance, eating one piece of steak or a cooked pork chop gives you four hunger points and 12.8 saturation. That means you only need either of the two types of meat to fill up your saturation bar. After that, it’ll take a very long time before you go hungry again. In addition to being nutritious, many of these meat types are fairly easy to farm.
Plus, as we’ve mentioned previously, a smoker in Minecraft isn’t just good for cooking. You can get creative and use it as a light source or to decorate your builds and give them a bit of texture. A smoker can also help you complete a music ensemble since it produces a bass drum sound when you put a note block on top of it.
Final Thoughts
Learning how to make a smoker is handy knowledge if you want to go far and make things easier for yourself in Minecraft. It only takes very little time and effort to build one. Plus, you can make a smoker in Minecraft with items that you can easily find in the overworld. Besides being cheap and easy to make, Minecraft smokers are also useful for cooking food and getting nourishment quickly.
Share this guide with a friend who you think can do with a bit of help from a smoker in Minecraft. If you’re looking for more Minecraft tutorials, you can check out our guides on how to make your own potions and how to tame and breed horses in Minecraft.
