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A dried kelp blocks smelts 20 items in a furnace. Dried kelp blocks are crafted from an easy attainable and farm-able item; kelp.

So why aren’t your using it for fuel in your furnace?

In this post I provide 3 reasons I think you should consider this block for fuel.

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Empty furnaces

I’ve been finding every time I attempt to smelt items in my super smelter it needs fuel.

There are two reasons for this:

1. if I smelt multiple stacks of items it takes a lot of fuel.
2. If I use less than a stack of items it uses a lot of fuel.

Whether I have few or many items I’m using fuel (spruce planks) at a rate that I can’t keep pace with. The switch to dried kelp blocks is step 1 in solving the fuel problem. Dried kelp blocks smelt 20 items each vs 1.5 items for planks.

Step 2 will be building a smaller furnace set up. Having less furnaces slows things down; however, there’s less wasted fuel. If the new set up has 4 furnaces I would only waste 4 fuel blocks if 1 item was smelted in each of the furnaces.

The super-smelter has 37 furnaces meaning I could waste up to 37 fuel blocks. I won’t decommission the super-smelter and it’ll be an asset for urgent situations.

Space requirements

To make this all work in a single chunk I need space for the smoker, a crafter, and the redstone. More than doable with a little planning.

There has to be space for a loading system and unloading and all this should be wrapped in an aesthetic/lore consistent build.

For reasons I’ll explain in a moment I’m going to build a dock and dock house. The build was designed on the fly and easily fits as a 1 Chunk build.

The redstone pictured above has 2 jobs:

1. Operating the crafter once 9 dried kelp enter
2. Managing an overflow, so that once the smoker is filled, excess dried kelp blocks go somewhere for collection.

Free range kelp

When deciding on where to place this build I first considered where my kelp would be coming from. I thought about making an automatic kelp farm; however, I live on an island with kelp fields growing all around.

In a minute or two I can break more kelp than my inventory can handle. So what do you do with all this kelp and no access to shulker boxes?

You craft a chest-boat.

After a minute of breaking kelp I return  to a chest-boat on the surface. All the kelp takes about another minute to float to the surface where I can collect it and transfer into the boats storage.

By having the build on a shoreline I can use a hopper to unload the chest boat automatically. An item elevator lifts the kelp into the smoker set up inside the build.

Once smelted a second boat is loaded with dried kelp blocks ready for transport. If you’re curious about how any of the redstone works let me know in the comments.

Moratorium-punk

The concept is a fishing stage with a mild “punk” twist. In Newfoundland and Labrador you might see a wooden wharf with a shed next to it for storing gear and maybe a boat in the winter.

I use a combination of stripped oak, oak planks and glow lichen to give the appearance of weathering.

Inside I decided to leave the smoker exposed and use scaffolding to support the suspended sections.

I wanted a chimney on the exterior and decided to use a fan to help evacuate fumes from the smoker and other equipment.

3 Reasons to use dried kelp blocks for fuel

Dried kelp blocks were touted as the fuel of the future when introduced to the game. Limitations at that time meant they never really captured the meta.

Here’s 3 reasons I think that should change and you should consider dried kelp blocks for fuel.

1. The crafter

While I’m all for expanding game play; opening your already full inventory to craft dried kelp blocks isn’t the kind of game-play I’m chasing. Now that we have the crafter we can produce kelp blocks for fuel without player interaction.

Kelp can be smoked and crafted into dried kelp block automatically. I used a full composter to gate the output from the crafter until it’s full.

This system does double duty activating the crafter and temporarily unlocking a hopper below the feed for the smoker. If the smoker is full, a dried kelp block will be sitting in this hopper and is pulled out.

The newly crafted dried kelp block will then travel down the line and sit in the hopper for the fuel slot. If the smoker uses up a block before the hopper unlocks it takes the block from the hopper.

2. Chest boats

Holding an extra inventory worth of blocks, chest boats simplify kelp smoking. Eliminating or delaying the need to build a kelp farm. Chest boats allow you to collect kelp without having to empty your inventory into a chest that you end up forgetting.

I used an item elevator to lift the kelp up into a a system but you could build your smoker set up at sea level. Drive your boat over a hopper and let the hopper drain the boat.

3. One chunk build

A simple kelp smoker set up takes up very little space; easily fitting into a 1 chunk build.

Want something you can tackle in a weekend or even an afternoon? A small boat house, custom tree, boat or seaside blacksmith easily hides or incorporates the smoker set up.

Wrap up

There’s a hundred tutorials for blacksmiths that you could follow for your exterior (or copy my build). The redstone is approachable or can be left out entirely; opting for a more manual approach. Put your build next to an ocean and you have all the kelp you’ll ever need.

You’re a boat, a chest, and some hoppers away from a functional, interactive build and infinite fuel.

Build stats

Real Life Days: 69

Minecraft Days: 354

Hours: 11

This build was a 1 chunk build, if you’d like to see more 1 chunk builds click here.