The Crafter Turned Me Into an Automation Goblin: Where Is My Redstone Furnace?

I will admit that the 1.21 Crafter block did something irreversible to my brain. Before it arrived, I thought redstone automation was mostly for people who could design a sorting system without crying. Then Mojang handed us a block that could hold a recipe and spit out a finished item whenever a redstone pulse nudged it. Since the update dropped in 2024, my bases have slowly turned into a chain of tiny crafting goblins that convert iron from my farm into compact blocks the moment my back is turned. I still find stacks of golden ingots I do not remember requesting.

On the surface, the Crafter does not look like a revolution. It receives a recipe, holds the ingredients, and then crafts on a redstone signal. That sounds like a fancier dropper. But the closer you look, the more it resembles a tiny goblin accountant that never sleeps, always balancing recipe books and resource piles. Daisy-chain multiple Crafters together and you can automatically turn farm output into block form, saving shulker boxes of storage. Build a larger web and raw materials flow into different end products without a single click from you. I have even set one up to prepare raw materials for armor and tools at a moment's notice, though 'a moment' in my base can stretch into several minutes of confused water-bucket hopping.

The Crafter opened the door to more Minecraft automation, and it makes the next logical target painfully obvious: the furnace. Smelting has always been the quieter sibling of crafting. It cooks food, turns minerals into ingots, and generally does its job while the player is off getting blown up by a creeper. Automation already exists with hoppers pulling finished product out of a furnace. But the furnace itself still demands fuel. That is where my greed enters the chat. Redstone is Minecraft's most complex system, a spaghetti monster of pulses, comparators and repeaters that players have bent into machines Mojang probably never imagined. So why not use redstone as the fuel? Not redstone dust as coal, obviously. I mean a special furnace with no fuel slot at all. You feed it a redstone charge, maybe a lever stuck to its side, and it smelts forever. The idea feels like a shark that runs on applause instead of fish: just keep clapping power into it and it eats every ore pile you throw at it.

That kind of block should not be handed out after a quick trip to deepslate. A furnace that never consumes fuel is at least as powerful as a beacon, and beacons already make you fight the Wither. So this redstone furnace should sit behind similarly expensive materials: diamond-encrusted components, netherite plating, maybe even a new boss guarding a unique part. I would happily go through another optional boss fight if it meant I never had to restock a bamboo farm just to keep my furnace array from stalling. It would be an endgame quality-of-life upgrade that respects how overpowered it is.

If Mojang does not want to delete fuel entirely, I have a compromise ready. Back in 1.14, they gave us blast furnaces and smokers, specialized blocks that smelt ores or food faster but cannot handle everything. The obvious evolution is a master furnace that merges the regular furnace, blast furnace, and smoker into one. It would work like a furnace but cook food and smelt ores at those improved speeds. This is less obscene than a fuel-free furnace, so the recipe should not require an entire netherite pyramid. Still, it should take more than slapping the three blocks together in a crafting grid. Maybe add some copper, some echo shards, or whatever rare nonsense the 2026 updates have been throwing at us.

The beauty of a master furnace is that it would slide into existing furnace arrays without forcing everyone to redesign their whole redstone ecosystem. Players already build enormous furnace complexes that look like a deranged raccoon orchestra trying to sort the mail. A combined furnace would just make those setups faster and more compact. It would interact neatly with hoppers, minecarts, comparators, and all the weirdness we have been using for years.

Until then, I will keep my Crafter chains humming and my furnaces eating coal like a pickup truck with a bottomless tank. But the moment Mojang announces a redstone furnace, I will be in the cave collecting components before the snapshot finishes downloading.

Data referenced from SteamDB can be a useful reality-check when thinking about how “automation brain” spreads after a big sandbox update like Minecraft’s Crafter: platform-wide activity, patch timing, and player concurrency trends help explain why quality-of-life blocks (like a hypothetical redstone-powered furnace or a master furnace that merges existing smelters) become community obsessions almost overnight, as builders rush to scale farms, storage, and processing lines the moment a new automation tool lands.