Coal Ore - Minecraft Block Guide | Properties, Recipe & Uses (2025)

What is Coal Ore in Minecraft?

Coal ore is a common mineral block that you can find while mining. It looks like a regular stone block with black specks embedded in it. Its main purpose is to be a source of coal, which is one of the most important early game resources. Coal is an excellent fuel for furnaces, allowing you to cook food and smelt ores like iron. It is also the key ingredient for crafting torches, which are essential for lighting up your base and exploring dark caves safely. Finding a big vein of coal ore is always a great feeling, as it means you will have plenty of fuel and light to help you on your adventures. There is also a deepslate version of this ore found deeper underground.

How to get Coal Ore in Minecraft

Coal ore is extremely common and can be found almost everywhere underground in the Overworld. It generates in large veins from the highest mountains all the way down to the deepslate layers. You are almost guaranteed to run into it while digging or exploring any cave. To get the coal from it, you need to mine the coal ore block with any type of pickaxe, including a wooden one. When you mine it, it will drop one piece of coal. If you use a pickaxe enchanted with Fortune, you can get multiple pieces of coal from a single ore block, which is a great way to stock up. If you mine the ore with a Silk Touch pickaxe, it will drop the coal ore block itself, which you can then place for decoration or smelt in a furnace to get one piece of coal.

How to use Coal Ore in Minecraft

The main use for coal ore is to mine it to get coal. Once you have the coal item, it has two very important uses. The first is as a fuel. You can place coal in the fuel slot of a furnace, blast furnace, or smoker, and each piece will smelt eight items. This is great for cooking food or turning your iron ore into ingots. The second major use is for crafting torches. By combining one piece of coal and one stick in a crafting grid, you can make four torches. Torches are vital for survival, as they provide light to prevent hostile mobs from spawning. You can also trade coal with some villagers to earn emeralds. The coal ore block itself is a nice decorative block for a mine or cave themed build.

How to craft Coal Ore in Minecraft

No recipes for this block.

What can Coal Ore make in Minecraft

Coal

My Story

How This All Started

So basically, I was playing Minecraft one night after a long day doing deliveries, and I was trying to remember what drops what and how to craft certain things. Every website I went to was either dead slow, missing loads of stuff, or just looked terrible. I thought "bloody hell, surely I can do better than this?"

By the way, this My Story section is something new I've only just started adding things here! Most of the site was actually built before I ever wrote this part. Now that the website is live, I'm running into problems galore! So if things look a bit rough or unfinished, bear with me I'm updating and adding as I go.

That was probably a mistake.

A half finished story, oh well. I'll keep adding more as I go!

Learning the Hard Way

I knew absolutely nothing about making websites. Like, properly nothing. I didn't even know what PHP was. But I'm stubborn as anything, so I just started watching YouTube tutorials and reading random stuff online while I was on my breaks.

Turns out building a database is harder than it looks. Who knew? I've probably broken this thing more times than I've fixed it. My laptop has definitely been sworn at more than it deserves.

The worst part is when you spend hours trying to figure out why something doesn't work, and it turns out you missed a semicolon. Or when everything works fine on your computer but looks like complete rubbish on someone else's. Fun times.

The Reality of It

Look, I'm not gonna lie this has been a right pain sometimes. I work full time doing deliveries, so most of this gets done late at night when I should probably be sleeping. I've had way too many energy drinks and definitely not enough sleep.

The database has corrupted itself more times than I care to remember. I've had images that wouldn't load for no reason. CSS that worked yesterday but decided to have a tantrum today. The usual web development nightmare stuff.

But every time I get something working properly, it feels brilliant. Like when I finally got all the block images showing up correctly, or when the search actually started finding things. Small wins, but they keep me going.

What I Actually Want to Build

Here's the thing I want this to be your go to place for everything Minecraft. Not just blocks and items, but proper guides, build tutorials, maybe even schematics you can download. Server info, community stuff, the lot.

I know it doesn't look like much right now, and there's loads missing. But I'm working on it. It takes time when you're learning as you go and doing it around a full time job. But I'd rather take my time and do it properly than rush it and end up with something rubbish.

The plan is to make it the kind of site I actually want to use fast, easy to navigate, with everything you need in one place. No endless ads, no broken links, just useful stuff presented in a way that doesn't make you want to throw your computer out the window.

Why I Keep Going

Honestly? Because every time someone uses this site or gives me feedback, it reminds me why I started. I love Minecraft, I love building things (both in game and apparently websites), and I love the community.

Plus, I've learned loads doing this. Sure, I've wanted to give up more times than I can count, but seeing it slowly come together is pretty satisfying. And if it helps other people find what they're looking for without having to trawl through ten different outdated websites, then that's worth it.

So yeah, bear with me while I figure this all out. It's going to take a while, but it'll get there eventually. Thanks for checking it out, and if you spot anything broken or have suggestions, let me know. I'm still learning, but I'm determined to make this work.