Block of the Week: Smoker

Unlike a furnace, the only thing you can put in a smoker is food – but that food will be processed twice as fast. In that way, it’s very much the counterpart of the blast furnace – which can quickly smelt ores, tools, and armor, but doesn’t work for food.

You can feed food items into it by hand, but if you want to automate things then you can also hook up a system of hoppers to insert food and fuel, and collect the cooked output. Oh, and if you put a note block on top, it’ll make the “bass drum” sound. Boom. Fun!

In the real world, the process of smoking likely dates back to the Stone Age. The simple dwellings people lived in back then lacked chimneys, so they would have been pretty smoky. They would also have likely hung up meat to dry and keep it away from pests. In the process, they probably noticed that meat stored in smoky areas was preserved better.

Today, we have refrigerators and other modern techniques for preserving food and so smoking is largely unnecessary. But meat, fish, tea, tofu, nuts, spices, cheese, fruits, vegetables, and many other kinds of food are commonly smoked still for taste reasons. 

In Minecraft, we don’t have fridges. So try smoking your meat and fish before storing it! You might like it – and you’ll never know until you try.