Minecraft is essentially a survival and crafting game with an immense amount of resources and materials to work with, whether it’s making builds or crafting items or gathering up material for use. The game classifies every material into ‘blocks’ of different type and most of the major materials are usually mined from veins of particular type running underground, using pickaxes and other mining tools. The player mines for specific resources and can even convert groups of material ore into major resources and they can be used to make pretty much anything depending on what you need. Crafting, a key part of the game, involves taking those various materials and combining them together to build almost any item in the game that the player has a use for.
As the name of the game suggests, most of the raw materials are mined and the various ores found throughout the game are then further refined into usable resources. The world of Minecraft is littered with countless different types of material, and even has sub-types for them such as different types of wood, stone, sand, clay, metal, and so on.
Charcoal vs Coal In Minecraft
The two materials in question, Coal and Charcoal, are essentially used for fuel and smelting purposes. They burn better and last longer than using wood as burning fuel and can be used in a variety of recipes or material conversions, and the major difference between the two is the way they are obtained.
Coal is mainly procured by harvesting Coal ore blocks from underground veins, whereas Charcoal is obtained from smelting wooden logs of any type using fuel (even using Coal as fuel to smelt logs into Charcoal). Charcoal is an alternative to Coal with the same purpose of being used as fuel, however, these two items are not the same and cannot be stacked together.
And where Coal can be crafted into a Coal block by combining multiple coal materials, Charcoal cannot form a block and is used as-is. Both these materials, when used in a furnace, last around 80 seconds and smelting 8 items while using up a single unit and are regarded as the most efficient types of fuel in the game. They are also the only kinds of fuel accepted by the powdered minecarts in mines.
Charcoal is formed when the wood of any type (log, stripped log, wood, stripped wood) is smelted in a furnace with fuel. Using Coal as fuel for making Charcoal is common as Coal burns longer and can easily produce 8 pieces of Charcoal in one go. Coal, on the other hand, can only be mined and using a pickaxe on Coal ore results in 1 unit of Coal. If the mining tool is enchanted with Fortune then it may result in more units being dropped.
Coal is also often dropped my Mobs, and Withers have a 1/3 chance of dropping Coal when defeated. And although used in the same manner, Coal is tradable with villagers and weaponsmiths while Charcoal is not. So, use Charcoal in areas where Coal is meager and carry on with your crafting adventures.