Let’s discuss fuel, because this may be more relevant with the auto-crafter coming.
I’m team charcoal, specifically giant jungle trees. Does everything regular coal does except coal blocks, need a lot of charcoal and sticks anyway for torches and tools, giant trees consistently produce over a stack, and lumberjacking is just a relaxing way to pass the time.
Charcoal is awful as fuel mid-late game. Only reason to use it for fuel is if you’re early game. To get charcoal you have to chop down trees and smelt logs. So to get your fuel, you have to smelt your fuel first. This is horribly inefficient both resource wise and time wise.
By mid game you should be using a lava farm. That should satisfy all your smelting needs mid game.
But by late game, you should have a wither skeleton farm. A great byproduct of running a wither skeleton farm is all the coal. The coal can be turned into blocks. In an hour of running it I had multiple stacks of blocks of coal. Each stack of blocks of coal can smelt 5,120 items. I cannot smelt items fast enough to burn all this fuel. I’m running cobblestone and basalt generators just to have an excuse to burn it.
But again, this is a late game farm, and they’re much easier to do on Java edition than bedrock. However, they’re still possible and if you get to late game in bedrock, you really should have one.
Many people love lava bucket farms and they’re neat as redstone contraptions, but 100 items vs 5,120 in nearly the same amount of time isn’t even a comparison. It’s a world of difference.