Minecraft is a game where survival means staying alive by sustaining yourself with food to keep your health bar full. And in the game, there are various ways a player can obtain food for sustenance. The player can hunt for passive mobs, harvest crops, cook food, and more. These options are available anytime they need to collect food to stave off hunger. One of the game mechanics allows a player to cook food in the game. Cooking in Minecraft can mean upgrading the current raw food item into a better one, which provides better restoration effects.
But again, there are various ways in which the player may cook their raw food items in the game, and one of these ways is to use the smoker. The smoker is a craftable and obtainable block mainly used for smelting raw food items and turning them into their cooked variation. Although the furnace is a more common block that most players often use to smelt almost anything, the smoker is explicitly built for cooking as it cooks food faster than a regular furnace. What is more—smokers are more than just your average utility block.
The smoker can be used by the player and a villager as it acts as the villager’s job site block. A villager whose job site block is a smoker will have the butcher profession. This allows for more trading options when it comes to villager-player trading. The butcher villager can potentially offer rare and essential items crucial to a player’s survival in Minecraft. While obtaining a smoker in the Overworld will not be available until you locate a village, you can craft a smoker yourself if you have the suitable materials for crafting. If you plan to obtain a smoker early on in the game, then crafting one is the best choice. This guide will show you exactly how to craft and correctly use a smoker in Minecraft.
How To Craft A Smoker in Minecraft
While obtaining one can be very easy, crafting one is the quickest way to get a smoker during an early game survival in Minecraft. The recipe is straightforward and requires you to obtain a few items first before crafting. All of the materials you will need will be listed below.
- Cobblestone: You will need eight cobblestone for the initial part of the crafting process. Cobblestone can easily be obtained by mining stones with your pickaxe. The cobblestone will be used to craft a furnace, which will be needed to craft the smoker.
- Logs: You will need four logs or stems of any kind in order to craft a smoker. All kinds of logs or stems or stripped logs including dark oak logs, jungle logs, warped stems, crimson stems, and even their stripped variations can be used interchangably for this crafting recipe. Logs can be obtained by chopping them down from trees using an axe. Stripped logs are obtained by using your axe and right-clicking on a log to peel the external layer off and then chopping it down so it drops as an item. Stems are the nether’s version of logs and they can be obtained by chopping down the trees found in the crimson forest and warped forest biomes.
Here is a step by step process on how to craft a smoker in Minecraft:
- Open the crafting menu by pressing your right-click mouse button on the crafting table.
- Place eight cobblestone blocks in a square pattern on each of the empty slots on the 3×3 crafting grid, leaving only the center slot empty.
- Once the image of the furnace is formed inside the results slot, click and drag it into your inventory to successfully craft the furnace.
- Next, place the newly crafted furnace on the center slot of the crafting grid.
- Then using four logs or stems, place one on each of the given slot positions: top-center, middle-left, middle-right, and bottom-center, forming a cross pattern on the 3×3 crafting grid.
- When the image of the smoker appears on the results slot, click and drag it to your inventory to complete the crafting process.
How To Use A Smoker in Minecraft
The primary usage of a smoker block is for cooking food items in the game since it smelts these items twice as fast as the normal furnace. The smoker is similar to the blast furnace as it is the food-cooking counterpart to a blast furnace’s ore-smelting. Although smelting ores and cooking raw food items can be done on a regular furnace alone, using better alternatives allows players to quickly smelt or cook and drastically cut down on the waiting time.
To use a smoker, place down the smoker block on the ground and open the smelting menu by pressing your right-click mouse button. Then place a food item such as a raw chicken, raw pork chop, or raw beef in the ingredient slot or the top slot of the smoker menu. And place a fuel source such as charcoal or coal in the fuel slot or the bottom slot of the smoker menu. Once both slots are filled, the cooking process will begin, and the fuel source will be consumed to become fuel for the smoker. The block state will also be changed into the lit state, and the fire symbol in the smelting menu will light up, indicating the current fuel source’s level.
In a smoker, the fuel used is double the rate of a normal furnace, making the number of food items cooked for every fuel source stay the same. So to maximize the fuel source used in a smoker, especially when cooking more than a single batch of 64 raw food items, it is best to use fuel sources that have a long burning time, such as a bucker of lava, a dried kelp block, a block of coal, a blaze rod, coal, and charcoal as these five items utilize the smoker best when it comes to smelting. Once the food item is cooked, click and drag it into your inventory to complete the process.
Another way to use the smoker is to use it as a job site block for villagers. Once an unclaimed smoker is placed on the ground, any unemployed villager nearby will immediately move towards the smoker and claim the block, turning their unemployed profession status into a butcher profession. A butcher villager will offer the player emeralds in exchange for available food items in the game. When a butcher villager works on their respective job site block during the day, their trade menu and inventory will replenish once any current offers are deemed out of stock. The player may still use both an unclaimed smoker and a claimed smoker for cooking food items as this does not affect the usage of the block whatsoever.
A unique way to use smokers in Minecraft is through note blocks. Note blocks give off a particular sound when struck by the player or through a red stone power. When a smoker is placed under a note block, the sound of the note block turns from its typical sound into a “bass drum” sound when hit, similar to other stone blocks.
