Highlights
- Survival in Minecraft requires constant access to food, and one player has created an efficient method of cooking raw meat using campfires.
- The mass cooker design using campfires is simple yet effective, allowing players to cook multiple pieces of meat simultaneously and provide a permanent source of fuel. Other players have suggested enhancements to automate the process.
- Hunting, farming, fishing, and foraging are different ways players can gather food in the game.
Surviving in Minecraft means that players constantly need to keep themselves stocked up on food, but one player ensured that they'll never go hungry again by creating a simple yet highly effective method of cooking up raw meat of every variety. The many different environments, mobs, and items in Minecraft allow fans to enjoy countless different foodstuffs, though some types of food are a lot easier to farm than others.
From the moment players spawn into their survival worlds for the first time, the clock starts ticking before the sun goes down, the monsters come out, and the need to eat sets in. Fortunately, food isn't very hard to come by. Most of the animals commonly found throughout a Minecraft world drop some form of meat when killed, so hunting can be a fruitful endeavor throughout the early-game. A little later on, fishing and animal farming can practically guarantee a steady income of sustenance, though more passive players might prefer to forage for fruit, grow vegetables, or bake bread instead.
While meat is generally more effective at keeping the hunger bar full in Minecraft, players will need some sort of furnace and a decent supply of fuel to keep the meat cooking. While this often isn't too tall a task either, one survival enthusiast within the Minecraft community turned up the heat by inventing a sort of mass cooker that's even more effective than a food smoker. This build is a surprisingly simple one, and was shared in a post on Reddit by a fan known as NoCheeseOutOfMe. The idea consists simply of filling a small room with campfires, and while this might seem like an outrageously simple concept, it has proven to have surprisingly efficient results.
Campfires can be interacted with if a player is holding raw meat in their hand to place it on the fire in order to cook it, with each campfire holding up to four pieces of meat at a time. A campfire takes 30 seconds to cook up all four pieces of meat simultaneously, as opposed to the regular furnace or smoker which, while faster, are still less efficient due to them only cooking one item at a time. Crafting this many campfires early on in Minecraft will require quite a lot of wood, but once built, can burn permanently and provide an infinite source of fuel with which to cook food – another advantage over the typical furnace, which needs to be constantly fed with fuel.
The design of this mass cooker can still be enhanced further though, as was pointed out by many other Minecraft fans. Some suggest that the addition of a minecart and hopper could make the process even more effective by automating it, while others suggest that the addition of some Allays could achieve the same effect. Either way, it goes to show how successful Minecraft's diverse mechanics are at arming players with plenty of different ways to approach an idea.
Minecraft is available on Mobile, PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.