Streamlining Your Smelting: The Raw Ore to Blocks Datapack
Mining trips in Minecraft often leave you with chests overflowing with raw copper, iron, and gold. Smelting each piece individually can feel like a tedious chore, especially when you are staring down stacks of raw ore blocks. The Raw Ore to Blocks datapack (ROtB) elegantly solves this problem by letting you toss entire raw ore blocks straight into the furnace, transforming them into their smelted block counterparts in one go. It is a small tweak that respects vanilla balance while saving you precious clicks and coal.
How the Smelting Magic Works
The core idea is beautifully simple. Normally, you would craft nine raw ores into a raw ore block for compact storage, but that block could not be smelted directly. With this datapack, placing a raw iron, gold, or copper block into a furnace or blast furnace initiates a smelting recipe that outputs the corresponding smelted ore block. This was primarily created to speed up copper processing, since that orange metal tends to pile up in absurd quantities, but it works just as well for iron and gold.
Careful Balancing for a Vanilla Feel
The creator put thoughtful effort into ensuring the datapack does not feel overpowered. Two key balance decisions keep it grounded:
- Smelting duration: A raw ore block takes exactly the same time to smelt as eight individual raw ores. That means you save the time of one ingot per block—1,600 ticks in a regular furnace or 800 ticks in a blast furnace. It is a modest efficiency gain, not a cheat.
- Fuel economy: You still consume only one piece of coal (or other fuel) per block smelted. Since nine ores would normally require nine fuel units, you effectively save one coal piece per block, a subtle but welcome resource preservation.
- Experience points: Smelting a raw ore block grants the same total experience as smelting nine single raw ores. You lose nothing on the XP front, keeping progression fair.
These tweaks make the datapack feel like a natural quality-of-life improvement rather than a game-breaking shortcut.
New Recipes and Advancements
ROtB introduces six fresh recipes—three for the standard furnace and three for the blast furnace—covering iron, gold, and copper raw ore blocks. The blast furnace versions are twice as fast, just as you would expect. This variety lets you integrate the feature seamlessly into your existing smelting setups.
Beyond recipes, the datapack also adds four new advancements. Three of them reward you with bonus experience points when you smelt a raw ore block for the first time, giving a small extra incentive to try the new mechanic. These advancements pop up naturally as you play, adding a touch of progression without feeling intrusive.
Installation and Compatibility Notes
Getting the datapack running is straightforward: drop the downloaded folder into your world’s datapacks directory and reload. If you enjoy a more polished launcher experience, the foxygame.net launcher provides a convenient, flexible, and modern way to manage your Minecraft installations, letting you browse and add datapacks directly from its menu without digging through file folders. The datapack itself is lightweight and should work alongside most Fabric mods, though the author is open to releasing compatibility add-ons for specific modded ores upon request via Discord.
Localization support is available from version 1.4.4 onward, with English and Polish translations included. Note that on CurseForge, the localization files are not flagged as a required dependency, so you will need to download them separately if you want the interface in Polish. The same localization file works for version 1.4.4.1 as well.
Future Updates and Community Support
The creator has committed to updating the datapack for each new full release of Minecraft, ensuring it stays functional as the game evolves. If you are running a modded setup with custom ores from Fabric mods, you can reach out on Discord to request compatibility add-ons. This open line of communication makes the datapack a living project rather than a one-off upload.
Why You Should Give It a Try
Raw Ore to Blocks fills a small but persistent gap in the vanilla smelting loop. It respects your time without handing out free ingots, and the careful balance adjustments mean it slots right into survival worlds without guilt. Whether you are building an industrial-scale super smelter or just tired of babysitting furnaces after a long mining session, this datapack offers a clean, elegant solution. The added advancements and blast furnace recipes give it just enough depth to feel like a deliberate feature rather than a quick fix. Once you start smelting whole blocks, you will wonder why it was not part of the base game from the start.
--- **Update Jul 4, 2026:** Added 1 file for version 26.2, 26.1.2, 26.1.1, 26.1.