How to make smooth stone in Minecraft

The recipe chain

Three blocks, two smelts:

Cobblestone  --smelt-->  Stone  --smelt-->  Smooth Stone

Mine stone with a normal pickaxe and you get cobblestone. Smelt that and you get stone back. Smelt the stone again and you get smooth stone, which is lighter and has no speckles.

You can skip the first step with a Silk Touch pickaxe, which drops stone directly, halving the fuel and the time for any large build.

Smooth stone slabs

Three smooth stone in a row in a crafting table gives six smooth stone slabs. These are the ones with the smooth top and the striped edge, and they are a different block from regular stone slabs.

They are one of the most used decorative blocks in the game, largely because the edge texture reads as a trim or a border at almost any scale.

What smooth stone is used for

Blast furnace. Five iron ingots, one furnace and three smooth stone. That is the only recipe that requires smooth stone rather than accepting a substitute, and it is why most players make it at all. Our blast furnace guide covers the rest.

Building. Its flat grey pairs with iron blocks, deepslate and concrete, which is why it shows up in nearly every modern or industrial build.

It is not used for the stonecutter, which needs regular stone, and that mix-up costs people a smelt.

Doing it at scale

A single furnace turning a double chest of cobblestone into smooth stone is a long wait. Build a small array of furnaces fed by a hopper from a shared chest, or use a super smelter design where hoppers distribute both the fuel and the input.

For fuel, a bucket of lava smelts 100 items and coal blocks smelt 80, so both beat loose coal by a wide margin when you are processing stacks. On a server with an economy it is often cheaper to buy smooth stone outright than to smelt it, so check the shops first. Plenty of the economy servers on this list have exactly that market.