Streamlining Your Smelting: The Block of Raw Metal Datapack
Minecraft’s smelting mechanics are a core part of survival gameplay, but they can sometimes feel a bit sluggish when you’re processing mountains of raw ore. If you’ve ever stared at a furnace filled with individual raw iron chunks and wished you could just toss in the whole block, you’re not alone. The Smelting Block of Raw Metal datapack is a lightweight, game-changing tweak that lets you do exactly that — smelt entire blocks of raw metal directly into their refined block counterparts. It’s a small quality-of-life upgrade that respects vanilla balance while saving you clicks and furnace management time.
What Does This Datapack Actually Do?
In vanilla Minecraft, you can craft raw ore blocks from nine raw metal pieces, but you can’t smelt them as a block. Instead, you have to break them back down into individual items, smelt each one, and then recraft them into storage blocks. This datapack removes that tedious step entirely. It adds a simple furnace recipe that accepts a block of raw iron, raw copper, or raw gold and outputs a corresponding block of iron, copper, or gold. The best part? The smelting time and experience rewards remain identical to smelting nine individual items. There’s no efficiency loss or gain — just pure convenience.
Supported Metals and Recipe Logic
The datapack covers all three metals that have raw block variants in the game:
- Raw Iron Block → Block of Iron
- Raw Copper Block → Block of Copper
- Raw Gold Block → Block of Gold
Each recipe works exactly as you’d expect. Place the raw block in the top slot of a furnace, add fuel, and wait. The progress arrow will fill at the same rate as smelting nine individual pieces, and once complete, you’ll receive a full refined block along with the same total experience orbs you’d get from the piece-by-piece method. This consistency means the datapack doesn’t disrupt the game’s economy or your XP grinding routines. It simply respects your time.
Why This Matters for Your Minecraft World
Bulk smelting isn’t just about laziness — it’s about workflow. When you return from a mining expedition with stacks of raw ore blocks, you can set up a furnace array that processes them in block form without the extra step of uncrafting. This is especially valuable in multiplayer servers where furnace tick rates can lag, or in modded environments where you might have massive automated smelting setups. The datapack integrates seamlessly with hopper-fed furnaces and blast furnaces, so your redstone contraptions will work exactly as before, just with fewer inventory management headaches.
If you enjoy customizing your game with datapacks, you might appreciate how easy it is to manage them with a modern launcher. The foxygame.net launcher, for instance, lets you browse and install community-made datapacks directly from its menu, keeping everything organized without digging through folders. This kind of flexibility makes experimenting with small tweaks like the Smelting Block of Raw Metal a breeze, especially if you’re juggling multiple worlds with different rule sets.
Installation and Compatibility
Installing this datapack is straightforward and doesn’t require any mod loaders. Simply download the datapack file from a trusted community platform like Planet Minecraft, then place it in the datapacks folder inside your world save directory. After reloading the world with /reload, the new recipes will be active. The datapack is designed for Minecraft Java Edition 1.17 and above, as raw ore blocks were introduced in the Caves & Cliffs update. It works flawlessly in singleplayer, multiplayer servers (as long as the server has the datapack installed), and alongside most other datapacks and mods that don’t alter furnace recipe handling.
Because the datapack only adds furnace recipes, it’s incredibly lightweight and won’t cause performance issues. There are no custom advancements or functions to worry about — it’s a pure recipe tweak. If you ever want to remove it, just delete the datapack file and run /reload again. Your existing world won’t be affected in any negative way.
A Small Change with Big Impact
Sometimes the best Minecraft improvements are the ones that feel like they should have been in the game all along. The Smelting Block of Raw Metal datapack doesn’t overhaul mechanics or add flashy new items; it simply removes a repetitive step that every player encounters. Whether you’re building a massive industrial district, speedrunning, or just trying to tidy up your chest monster, this datapack saves you from the monotony of uncrafting and recrafting. It’s a perfect example of how community creators polish the vanilla experience without breaking its spirit. Give it a try, and you’ll wonder why you ever smelted raw ore one piece at a time.