Taking Inventory: Charcoal

When you’re just starting out in Minecraft, you might think that the obvious fuel source to power your base is coal. You’ll collect plenty of it while mining, and it lasts for ages in a furnace. Plus, greenhouse gas emissions aren’t a thing in Minecraft. But there’s another fuel that lasts just as long as coal does, and is far easier to gather. It’s our item of the week – charcoal.

Charcoal was added to Minecraft in January 2011 alongside cake, squid and lapis lazuli as part of the Beta 1.2 update (this was before the updates had fancy names). It had been suggested by a player called Moleculor about a month beforehand, to be used as a drawing implement. That’s not how it turned out, though.

It’s pretty easy to get hold of some charcoal. Chop down a tree, put the logs in a furnace, and wait a few moments. You’ll need a fuel source – I suggest using a couple of sticks. Two sticks will fully cook one log into one charcoal, and then one charcoal will cook eight more logs into eight more charcoal, and then eight logs will cook sixty-four wood into sixty-four charcoal, and then [Ed: Stop. Just stop.]

Once you’ve got a mountain of charcoal, you can use it in more or less any situation that requires a fuel source. It’s just as efficient as coal, and will even work in furnace minecarts, which don’t accept most fuel sources. Need more? Just chop down a few more trees. Much easier than digging around below the ground.

You can also use charcoal in a few recipes – to make campfires, fire charges, torches, and soul torches. Again, just swap out the coal that you’d normally use for charcoal and it should work fine.

Image credit: European Union // CC BY 4.0

Charcoal is just as important a fuel in the real world as it is in Minecraft. It’s made by heating wood in a furnace where there’s as little oxygen as possible, so that all of the water and other liquids are removed, but the carbon stays put so that it can be burned later.

The production of charcoal goes way back to ancient times -historically, wood would be slowly piled up into a big cone, which would then be covered in soil and straw, before eventually set alight. The soil stopped air, and oxygen, from getting to the wood, which would then become charcoal over a period of several days. Today it’s a much faster and cleaner process.

Why would you go to all that trouble? Because charcoal burns hot. Iron’s melting point is about 1200C, and that’s about the temperature that charcoal burns at. So if you want to make iron or steel, and you live in a place that doesn’t have much coal, then for thousands of years charcoal was more or less your only option. It’s also a handy fuel for cooking.

In Minecraft, there’s plenty of coal. But there are also plenty of trees. So we figured it’d be nice to give players the choice. Are you a coal-burner, or a charcoal-burner? Your answer might say more about you than you think...