Refractory Furnace Smelting Assembly

So you want to smelt metals eh? Or maybe you just want to get to the steam engine and understand that this is the first step toward that end. Or hey, maybe you don't know or care what that is, but you want to use that sweet belt sander and saw bench. The refractory furnace and smelting assembly is the first step to that end. It is a multi-block structure and it requires a minimum of the following:

• At least one thermal accelerator (is just a fancy-stupid name for a pump that pumps lava)
• At least one refractory furnace, much like the regular furnace
• Piping to connect the two machines
• Redstone power to the thermal accelerator

You can make much more complex piping networks than this but we'll save that for another tutorial. One mineral in particular this assembly uses a lot of is a ruddy mineral called bauxite.

The Refractory Furnace

The refractory furnace, much like the regular furnace, is a machine with a GUI that can smelt almost anything metallic including ores, tools, and armor. This is particularly useful for armor since monsters drop damaged metal armor all the time, and if you have a refractory furnace already up and running this saves you the trouble of mining new ores if you have a steady supply of metal coming from melting down damaged mob armor.

Crafting

Crafting the refractory furnace is just like crafting the regular furnace but with an exotic and ruddy mineral called bauxite

The Thermal Accelerator

The thermal accelerator is a pump that pumps lava through pipes to the refractory furnace. Here's some requirements to keep in mind about it:

1. To operate, it must be placed adjacent to at least one block of still or flowing lava (still is better)
2. Cannot be placed on-top of anything other than a solid foundation; typically some kind of stone, brick or ore
3. It must be powered by redstone power before it will actually pump lava
4. It only pumps lava through connected bauxite pipes

To power it with redstone you can put it next to a block that is powered by redstone or run the redstone directly into the thermal accelerator. The simplest design is to put a block next to the thermal accelerator with a lever on it (as depicted above). Redstone design is beyond the scope of this tutorial, so we won't be mentioning redstone anymore in this tutorial.

Crafting

Crafting a thermal accelerator is laborious and a bit expensive, it involves bauxite, molybdenum, rhenium, and blaze rods (that last one requires hunting for blaze monsters in the Nether). The first thing you should do is make sure you have some rhenium and molybdenum ore and smelt it in a regular furnace.

NOTE: Rhenium is rare and looks a lot like molybdenum ore but requires a diamond pickaxe as a minimum to mine. You can find rhenium ore hosted within clusters and veins of molybdenum ore. If you try to mine it with anything else it will break and you'll lose a very precious and essential mineral. So to keep on the safe side, always mine molybdenum ore with a diamond pickaxe even though you can use an iron one. For more information use CraftGuide, enter "moly" in the search and it will show you pictures of the ore and ingot as well as all the recipes for them.

The Blaze-Infused Rhenium Catalyst

Once you have the rhenium ore, have smelted it, then you need to go to the Nether and collect some blaze rods. Assuming you've done that, craft 8 blaze powder from your rods and then surround a single ingot of rhenium metal with it to make a blaze-infused rhenium catalyst:

The Pump Itself

Now to complete crafting the thermal accelerator you'll need:

• 6 bauxite
• 2 molybdenum metal ingot
• 1 blaze-infused rhenium catalyst (see above)

Piping

To finish-up our refractor furnace smelting assembly we need to connect the thermal accelerator to the refractory furnace. The pipes are made from bauxite clay, and although there are four different types of pipe configurations you could make, we will be crafting just corner and straight bauxite pipes.

Bauxite Clay

1. Assuming you already have a Quern and know how to operate it, take some bauxite and grind it up in the quern to make bauxite powder (make a lot of it, at least 4 stacks, you'll need more for later anyway).
2. Now craft bauxite clay from the powder with bottles of water. Surround a stack of bottles of water with the powder as depicted below:

Straight Pipes

Use the bauxite clay to make a few straight bauxite clay pipes in a horizontal configuration in your crafting matrix as depicted:

Corner Pipe

Use the bauxite clay to make a corner bauxite clay pipe as depicted:

Pipe Wrench

There's one more thing to craft, it's a reusable tool and not an ingredient. The pipe wrench is used to rotate pipes around after you place them in-case they are oriented the wrong way. Craft one of these using:

• 2 iron ingots
• 3 sticks

Putting it All Together

Now we put the entire assembly together (this is the fun part).

1. Review the requirements for a thermal accelerator and place it in or next to some lava / magma.
2. Place a block next to the thermal accelerator with a lever on it
3. Place the refactory furnace a short distance away (use the picture at the beginning of this tutorial as a guide)
4. Place a corner pipe on-top of the thermal accelerator, use the pipe wrench to rotate it as necessary by right-clicking with the wrench on the pipe
5. Place straight pipes to finish connecting the refractory furnace

Now flip the lever, right-click the refractory furnace, and smelt some stuff!