How to Make Iron Ingots in Minecraft

Diamonds get all the glory, but iron is the material your world actually runs on. Ingots turn into pickaxes, buckets, rails, pistons, anvils, hoppers and the armor that keeps you alive long enough to go looking for diamonds in the first place. The good news is that making them is simple once you know the three routes: smelting, crafting, and a bit of looting on the side.

What You Need

• Raw iron and a furnace with fuel, for smelting
• Nine iron nuggets or one block of iron, for crafting
• A blast furnace (optional, but smelts twice as fast)
• A crafting table for the crafting routes and for building the blast furnace

Smelting Raw Iron into Ingots

This is how almost every ingot in your chests will be made. Mine iron ore with a stone pickaxe or better and it drops raw iron. Place a furnace, put fuel such as coal, charcoal or planks in the bottom slot, and load the raw iron into the top slot. A few seconds later, one raw iron becomes one iron ingot.

If you process a lot of ore, build a blast furnace instead. It only accepts ores and raw metals, but it smelts them at double speed, which adds up quickly after a long caving trip. A smoker will not help you here — it is for food only.

Crafting Ingots from Nuggets and Blocks

Iron also recycles neatly. Fill all nine slots of a crafting grid with iron nuggets and you get one ingot back — handy after smelting down old iron gear, since tools and armor smelt into nuggets. Going the other way, placing a single block of iron in the grid returns nine ingots, so storage blocks are never a dead end. If you have a crafter block and a steady supply of nuggets, you can even automate the nugget-to-ingot step with redstone.

Where Else to Find Iron Ingots

Smelting is reliable, but it is not the only source:

• Structure loot: chests in dungeons, mineshafts, buried treasure, desert temples, shipwrecks and villages often contain a few ingots.
• Iron golems: a killed golem drops several ingots, which is exactly why iron farms are built around them.
• Undead mobs: zombies, husks and zombie villagers occasionally drop a single ingot.

Tips for a Steady Iron Supply

For raw iron itself, caving beats digging. Exposed ore in cave walls gives you raw iron with no fuel wasted on gravel and stone, and the stony peaks biome is famous for huge amounts of exposed iron near the surface. Remember that iron generates in every biome, so any big cave system works. And if you want the ore block itself for decoration, mine it with a Silk Touch pickaxe — ore blocks cannot be crafted.

Once the basics feel slow, an iron farm is the natural next step. It produces ingots passively while you do other things, and it is one of the most worthwhile early builds in any long-term world. Keep a spare stack in your ender chest, too — iron is the one material you always need away from home.