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.
Coal block
I just empty my (IlMango’s small version) lava farm. 288 buckets loaded into Shulker boxes. Only 28,800 items worth at a run, but only takes me 2 minutes to empty. (and it’s in the lower floors of my base, so it’s always full when I need it). The lava farm is surprisingly resource and lag light.
Lava, kelp, bamboo, blaze rods, maybe duped carpet, there are a lot of really good renewable fuel sources that require zero effort if you have a farm
I just use whatever I can, planks, logs, sticks, pickaxes, doors
with the crafters coming next update, kelp is objectively the best fuel source, you can make a farm that will automatically collect,dry and block up kelp infinite renewable fuel that smelts 20 items per block
A giant tree can grow, be harvested, a cooked into charcoal before you can produce 10 kelp blocks.
number one thats definitely untrue, kelp farms are simply more efficient, number two your tree wont plant itaelf,bonemeal itself,put itself in a furnace,fuel itself without you having to manually do that
youre just delusional if you think charcoal is even NEARLY as efficient, hell bamboo farms are a more efficient fuel source
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.
Lava fuel is awesome. You can make a lava farm with dripstone now. And you can get iron buckets for free with the iron farms. You have to craft buckets but with the crafter coming out soon I bet we can craft iron buckets. So we can have a fully automatic lava fuel farm.
The best fuel depends on where you are in the game.
Early game, before you have any farms beyond iron: anything you can burn. Logs, coal, charcoal. You’re unlikely to be doing any serious smelting jobs.
Mid game: Blaze rods (since you’ll likely have a blaze farm), possibly bamboo except you need ~82 bamboo plants per furnace to keep it permanently fueled (164 plants for smokers/blast furnaces since they burn twice as fast).
Late game: Coal blocks (since you’ll probably have a wither skeleton farm). However, that’s not automated. Once the crafter is implemented, the best fuel source will be kelp blocks - without question. You only need ~22 kelp plants per furnace to smelt without ever stopping, fully automated.
The best fuel for now is defi lava produced on a dripstone lava farm. After the update the best will definitely be fully automatic kelp block farms