Featured image credit: Mojang
Campfires are one of the many cool and exciting blocks that exist within Minecraft. They can provide light and fit well in many stylistic builds, are a core component of mob farms, and can even hurt other players.
You can also use Minecraft campfires for cooking food by simply placing four pieces of raw food items (fx salmon) on each side of the campfire block.
And the cool thing is that you don’t need to add extra fuel – like coal, for instance – as you do with furnaces and smokers.
But once you have that flame going, how do you put it? How do you extinguish what seems to be an eternal fire, forever existing within the Minecraft world?
Keep reading to see everything you need to know about the Minecraft campfire!
How to Extinguish Campfires in Minecraft
(Image credit: Mojang)
So, you made the campfire, which has been sitting around your base, sending plumes of smoke into the sky, and you want to put it out. But how can you do that?
Well, there are three main ways that you can accomplish this task.
The first way is by simply breaking the campfire.
To break campfires, simply mine it with any tool (an axe is the fastest). A standard campfire drops two charcoal, and a soul campfire drops soul soil.
The only downside to this method is that you won’t have your campfire anymore (unless your tool is enchanted with Silk Touch).
The second way is by using a water bucket. Simply dump the bucket of water directly on the campfire by right-clicking on the campfire.
You can also use a splash water bottle potion as an alternative to the water bucket. I have no idea why you would have those in your inventory, but go ahead, throw it at the eternal flame.
The final way to put out Minecraft campfires is by using a shovel. Simply right-click on the campfire with the shovel, and it will put it out for you.
Did you die in the middle of nowhere and lose all your hard-earned gear? Check out how to manually set a respawn point in this guide.
Minecraft Campfire Crafting Recipe
Before you can put up a campfire, you must have one in your Minecraft world. To make one, follow this straightforward campfire recipe.
1. Place three wooden blocks in the three slots in the bottom row of your crafting table.
You can use any wood logs, stripped logs, wood blocks, stripped wood, stem, stripped stem, hyphae, or stripped hyphae in the bottom row.
2. Place a piece of charcoal or coal in the middle slot of the second row.
3. Place three sticks as shown in the below picture.
This content was first published on GameDaft.com
Voila! You now have the eternal fire known as a campfire block.
All you have to do then is place it down in the world, and then when you get tired of it, you can extinguish it, which I’ll get back to in a minute.
Other Methods of Acquiring a Campfire
Now what if you do not want to craft the campfire but still want to have one simply to put it out? Well, there are two other ways of finding a campfire in Minecraft.
The first is by searching for a Taige village. These snow-covered villages have a chance to spawn with a campfire somewhere within them, allowing you to break it.
Remember, if you break it without a silk touch tool, you are back at square one and have to craft it yourself.
The second way is by trading with a villager. In Java Edition, apprentice-level fisherman villagers have a 66% chance of trading a campfire for only two emeralds.
And here’s an extra tip for you. If you encounter an extinguished campfire block, you can use a fire charge or – even cooler – a flaming arrow to light it again.
Imagine if you were to build a Viking longship, place campfires on it, and stand on the short with a flaming arrow to light it. How’s that a Minecraft Viking funeral? Come to think of it, I might have to try this myself!
Into arrows and explosions? Check out this guide to crossbow enchantments.
Soul vs. Normal Campfire
While regular campfires have their uses and look cool enough, you can create a second kind of campfire. It is called the soul campfire and burns with a blue flame fueled by the souls of those lost within the Nether.
(Image credit: Mojang)
To craft it, replace the piece of coal with a block of soul soil or soul sand, and there you go. You now have a blue campfire that not only looks amazing, but you can also throw water at it to put it out.
There are a few differences between soul and regular campfires, which, while not necessarily game-breaking, could mean the difference between a working build and one that fails.
- Brightness: Regular campfires have a brightness level of 15, while soul campfires, since souls fuel them, only produce a light level of 10.
- Damage: Soul campfires deal twice the damage as regular campfires, with regular campfires dealing 1 point of damage per tick and soul campfires dealing 2 points per tick.
- Piglins: The blue flame makes Piglins scared, providing an eight-block radius that they will not enter around it.
- Melting Ice: Soul campfires cannot melt ice blocks like its cousin, the regular campfire, due to a lack of heat.
Other Fun Uses of the Campfire
Campfires in Minecraft have several cool features that can help you take your builds further.
If you put a campfire under a bee nest, the smoke rises and soothes the bees. That way, you can harvest honey bottles and honeycombs without provoking the hive. Remember that air must be between the fire and the nest unless you use a carpet.
In the Minecraft Java edition, you can place the campfire below ground level and then place a carpet directly on top of it. Now you can place a bee nest directly on the carpet without burning the hive. This doesn’t apply to Bedrock Edition, where a carpet will remove the pacifying effect from the smoke instead.
If there is a trap block (fx a trap door) placed one block above the campfire, it will prevent the smoke from going upwards. You can accomplish this with any block, but this little trick is great for building bee farms.
When a hay bale is placed underneath a lit campfire, it causes the smoke particles to become a smoke signal that goes 24 blocks up into the air.
(Image credit: Mojang)
Campfires can also be waterlogged like a slab or stair block, and clicking on it with a flint and steel will cause the adjacent block to catch fire.
Conclusion
Campfires have a lot of different uses in Minecraft: they work as a spread-proof light source (meaning you won’t burn down all your precious crops because of the fire spread), they are useful for cooking food (because they don’t need any kind of fuel), they are great for pacifying bees (so you can steal their honey), and they can even keep piglings at bay.
And when you want to put them out to get rid of that fire and smoke, you can do so with water or a shovel.
If you enjoyed this article, check out how to make a spyglass in Minecraft. Until next time, happy gaming!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jan has played video games since the early 1980s. He loves getting immersed in video games as a way to take his mind off stuff when the outside world gets too scary. A lifelong gamer, the big interest led to a job as a lecturer on game sound at the University of Copenhagen and several written articles on video games for magazines.