The Blast Furnace Update.

As for now the Blast Furnace is just a faster furnace, which is something good. But I think it can be much better.

With the Copper Age update smelting has become really inefficient. We first mine and collect raw copper, which then craft into raw copper blocks to save some inventory space. Then we have to break them back to smelt them and finally craft copper blocks back. Instead, I suggest that the blast furnace should be able to smelt whole raw blocks directly, copper as well as iron. This will be a great time saver and also make the blast furnace really useful apart from it being just a faster furnace.

Also, since we already have iron and copper ingots that we can get from smelting items I suggest that the blast furnace should be able to smelt anything that is not a full block and return an "ingot" of the material that we can then craft into the full block. For example, we could smelt stairs, slabs and walls and even diamond tools etc.

All this will help with storage and resource management. We'll no longer have to throw away the, for example, 64 cobblestone walls we accidentally craft but we could compress them to full blocks. Also, we could get something back from the almost broken diamond tools or armor that we can't mend any longer, and re-use it to craft new ones.