Minecraft 26.3: fuel overhaul rewrites all 107 smelting recipes — Furnace, Blast Furnace, Smoker, and the empty bucket trap

Since Tuesday, September 1, 2026, Minecraft's 26.3 is no longer a snapshot: it has moved to pre-release status. Mojang published 26.3 Pre-Release 1 that day at 1:29 PM, then 26.3 Pre-Release 2 on Friday, September 4, 2026 at 1:54 PM — Paris time, converted by us from the UTC timestamps in the version manifest. The latest stable version remains 26.2, released on June 16, 2026, and no release date has been announced for 26.3.

The studio warns at the top of the first pre-release's notes: « There are technical changes, but we are now mainly fixing bugs, making improvements and putting on the final touches ahead of release. » So no new content. Except that the technical section of that same page closes out a project opened in July, and it affects four blocks that everyone uses: the Furnace, the Blast Furnace, the Smoker and the Brewing Stand. We opened the server file for pre-release 2: the figures below come from it.

Everything is in pre-release 1, the second one doesn't touch it

First point, easy to miss: pre-release 2 contains no changes related to cooking — an interface change, a tag renaming, thirty-seven bug fixes. The entire overhaul is in pre-release 1, which bumps the data pack version to 119.0.

The project doesn't date back to September: it begins at snapshot 4, on Thursday, July 16, 2026, with two item components, minecraft:cooking_fuel — « Describes an item that can be used as fuel for a Furnace, Smoker or Blast Furnace » — and minecraft:brewing_fuel.

Fuel has moved from code to data-driven content

Up to 26.2, an item's burn duration was hardcoded into the program. Pre-release 1 shifts it into the new number provider system: burn_time becomes a minecraft:context_int_provider, speed_multiplier a minecraft:context_float_provider. Readable files, then, and editable via datapack.

Pre-release 2's server file contains eighteen of them for cooking. The durations below are expressed in ticks in an ordinary Furnace; the "items cooked" column is our own division by the 200 ticks each item costs, as the publisher gives none.

Blast Furnace and Smoker: the doubling has changed place

The Blast Furnace and the Smoker cook twice as fast as a Furnace. This acceleration used to be written into the recipes; it is now carried by the fuel.

The mechanism fits into four small files. A predicate, minecraft:block/fast_cooking, targets only minecraft:smoker and minecraft:blast_furnace. The speed multiplier is set there to 2.0 against 1.0 elsewhere, and the duration reduction factor to 2 against 1: each duration in the table is halved while the cooking speed doubles. Identical yield: that's the goal.

Getting the symmetry right took two months. Pre-release 1 fixes MC-311183, "Fuel in blast furnaces and smokers smelts double the items": the duration was not being reduced, and a piece of Coal would cook sixteen items instead of eight in a Blast Furnace. This is not a nerf compared to 26.2, but an internal anomaly within 26.3, fixed before release.

Two providers disappear along the way, normal_burn_time_multiplier and fast_burn_time_multiplier, "replaced by" their equivalents in reduction_factor. Integer division is truncated toward zero, the notes state: the odd values in the table, 4,001 and 67, lose a fraction of a tick there, with no consequence at the scale of a single cooked item. This is our reading, not a warning from the publisher.

The cookingtime field becomes mandatory: 107 recipes rewritten

This is the kind of change that will break things for others. The pre-release 1 notes leave no room for doubt: « The cookingtime field of all cooking recipes is no longer optional. Custom Smoker and Blast Furnace recipes should be updated accordingly, by setting cookingtime to twice the previous value. If a custom cooking recipe was previously relying on the default cookingtime value, 200 can be used to maintain the same timing. »

Comparing the two server files gives a sense of the scale. In 26.2, none of the 107 Furnace, Blast Furnace, and Smoker recipes carry a cookingtime field: 73 smelting recipes, 25 Blast Furnace recipes, and 9 Smoker recipes rely on the default value. In pre-release 2, all 107 now show 200, including those that ran on a default of 100. Only the 9 Campfire recipes keep their 600 ticks.

The consequence boils down to one sentence: if your custom Blast Furnace or Smoker recipes showed 100, they must now show 200; if they showed nothing at all, they will no longer load. Pre-release 1 also fixes MC-311274, « The default value of the cookingtime field for blasting and smoking recipes is still 100 ».

The empty bucket, the hopper, and a two-entry tag

The second addition in pre-release 1 is more discreet, and trickier. Fuels that leave behind an item — in the base game, Lava Bucket, which returns a Bucket — now follow a two-branch rule: « If there is fuel remaining in the fuel slot, the remainder item will be dropped on the ground. If the fuel has run out, the remainder item will remain in the fuel slot. »

In plain terms: if fuel remains in the slot, the returned item is dropped on the ground; if none remains, it settles into the slot, as before. We found no base-game fuel in the pre-release 2 data capable of triggering the first branch, and the publisher does not name any either: this targets fuels added via datapack, now made possible. On an automated farm, the point of caution is this: an item dropped on the ground is no longer picked up by the Hopper below.

Hence the way out. Pre-release 1 adds an item tag, #furnace_fuel_bottom_takeable, « Items that can be taken out of furnace by a hopper attached to the bottom face ». We opened it: it contains exactly two entries, minecraft:bucket and minecraft:water_bucket — the Bucket and the Water Bucket. Mojang does not present this bottom-side retrieval as a new feature: what changes is that it is now described through a tag, and can therefore be expanded via datapack.

The Brewing Stand undergoes the same overhaul and loses a tag in the process. #brewing_fuel, which in 26.2 only contained Blaze Powder, has disappeared in favor of the component; the pre-release 2 file confirms its removal and sets the default number of uses at 20.

What to remember

For the average player, the yield does not change: one Coal still smelts eight items, across all three blocks. The numbers in the table are those from 26.2, simply made readable now.

For everyone else — server admins, datapack authors, farm builders — three checks are needed before release: cookingtime present and doubled on Blast Furnace and Smoker recipes; alchemy fuels migrated from the tag to the component; any item-returning fuel registered in #furnace_fuel_bottom_takeable, otherwise the Hopper below will not pick it up.

The timeline remains unclear: Mojang has not published any date for stable 26.3. A second pre-release usually signals a nearing end of the cycle, but that's a reading of the studio's history, not information from the publisher.