by VanessaE » Mon Aug 13, 2012 01:39
The furnace is intended for smelting raw materials into finished goods, or for cooking food.
First, find any tree and punch at all the leaves to collect them. Then, punch at the trunk until it is completely cut down. If you don't have a pickaxe of some type, craft a tree trunk into wood, then some of that into sticks, and use the wood and sticks to make a wooden pickaxe.
If you received any saplings from felling the tree, place them like any normal block to plant them. Trees are a renewable resource, so always replant after you cut one down.
Now, use your pickaxe to dig up a bunch of stone. This becomes cobblestone as you collect it. If you can't find any right away, just dig straight down. It usually isn't more than 2-3 meters under the dirt.
Open your inventory and place eight cobblestone around the sides/top/bottom of the crafting grid, leaving the center slot open. The result is a furnace - take it from the crafting result slot and place it in your world like a normal block.
Now, you still have wood and cobble handy already, so let's do a test.
Right click on the newly-placed furnace and the furnace screen should open (if it doesn't, you probably dropped something, so pick up what you dropped, look away, then look back and try again). Move one "wood planks" item to the lower left slot in the upper part of the screen. This is the furnace's fuel slot.
Move a bunch of cobblestone into the upper-left slot above the fuel. This is your raw material slot.
The furnace will take the wood block from the fuel slot and start burning it. As long as it's burning and there is cobble to smelt, that cobble will be turned back into smooth stone. Once the cobble runs out, the wood will continue to burn until the one item you placed is exhausted. if you placed too many wood blocks into the fuel slot, that's okay - only the one that was burning when the cobble ran out will be used.
The results will be deposited into one of the four slots on the right. Any excess cobble will remain in the material slot, and excess fuel will remain in the fuel slot.
This process works for any fuel and any raw material that can be smelted. Note that some fuels (like leaves) won't show a burning flame in the furnace, but they still work anyway.