How to smelt armor in Minecraft 1.19 update

The world of Minecraft is wrought with all kinds of dangers, both mob-related and environment-related. Players can lose their lives and, worse, their valuable items instantly.

They need every bit of protection and defense they can get to prevent such a fate. This is where armor sets come into play.

Armor sets come in four pieces, each providing its wearer with varying levels of protection. When users are equipped with a single piece of armor, a bar representing it appears over their default health bar. The number of armor pieces or the tier of armor affects the armor bar in different ways.

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Minecraft 1.19: Best way to smelt armor

Among the many tiers of armor in the game, each tier is made from a different resource. In a similar fashion to the six main weapon tiers at the player’s disposal, gamers can find seven types of armor in Minecraft.

Out of these seven, six tiers are composed of full armor sets (iron, leather, chainmail, diamond, gold, netherite), while the “turtle” tier only comprises a helmet that gives users a certain degree of water breathing.

The tier of the armor pieces plays a significant role after the durability of a weapon runs low or when individuals desperately need a particular resource.

Armor pieces, like many items in Minecraft, can be smelted. While they can’t necessarily be used as a fuel source or food, they can most certainly be used to extract the resources they are made of.

For players to be able to smelt an armor piece, they will need a furnace or blast furnace and a fuel source. Sources like coal, charcoal, blocks of coal, and lava will do.

Furnaces can be crafted using eight blocks of cobblestone or a stone variant. In contrast, its counterpart, the blast furnace, is significantly more expensive (though significantly more efficient), requiring five iron ingots, a regular furnace, and three blocks of smooth stone.

Once the furnaces are crafted, users must place them and put a fuel source in their lower slot. The upper slot will be filled using the piece of armor they want to smelt. Smelting each type of armor piece will give a different result.

Smelting chainmail or iron armor will give one iron nugget per piece while smelting a gold piece will give gamers gold nuggets. It is important to note that the remaining four tiers of armor (turtle, leather, diamond, and netherite) cannot be smelted.

This is because the resources used in crafting these types of armor are not metals or raw ores. Therefore, players cannot obtain diamonds from diamond armor, netherite ingots from netherite armor, leather from leather armor, or turtle shells from a turtle shell helmet.

While each armor piece in Minecraft is essential and contributes to the user’s overall protection, the best safeguard is usually achieved through equipping an entire armor set. However, one of the unique things about the game’s armor sets is that many tiers of armor can be combined to make a complete set.

As mentioned above, Minecraft gamers get metal ingots when smelting iron, chainmail, or gold armor. However, this is usually not worth the hassle, and quite often, they can save their resources by repairing or combining armor pieces instead of smelting or destroying them.