you can smelt iron armour and tools in furnaces, but this is very inefficient because the amount of iron you get back is not proportional to the iron used to make the tools or armour and the durability remaining on them.
No matter what you still only get nuggets, which are only worth 1/9 of an ingot.
Lots of people are wanting it to be made impossible to AFK iron from iron golems, but very few people are suggesting good alternatives for getting abundances of iron. I disagree that strip mining is enough to compensate for this, given the projects me and friends have planned and no doubt many others do. There may be enough iron ore underground for the strictly survival player who only cares about fighting monsters and surviving, therefore the only things they'd be using iron for are things like compasses, tools, armour, flint and steel, anvils, shears and perhaps iron blocks for beacons. but people who do massive builds consisting of factory/industrial buildings consisting of stacks of iron blocks, large multi railway systems spanning thousands of blocks each way, farms that use tens of thousands of hoppers etc, there's a problem.
I've used up about 6 stacks of iron ore just to build lanterns around my village area, and I've not even finished them yet, I need more iron.
And I want to be using iron for more practical things than only aesthetics all the time, but unfortunately I and friends on my server run into a conflict between the two because getting iron the old school way is slow. I agree with SimplySarc's suggestion on Youtube regarding this, dedicating particular biomes with large veins of iron ore (similar to the Mesa biome and gold ores) would be the first step to giving a practical alternative for iron golem farms for people who need more iron than the average Minecraft player for their projects.
I don't have an iron golem farm on my current 2 survival worlds,
mainly because I'm thinking, we shouldn't have to exploit overpowered mechanics just to get resources needed for certain projects.
Offtopic but true
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Dwarf gamer found:
Buildings - square, not round
Materials - from rubble mound
Dark caves - lit 'n' cleaned out
Settlements - deep underground
Farmability - to grinder bound
Shields - made creepers but sound
Axes and crossbows - taking mobs out
The availability of iron is relevant when we're talking about cauldrons.
Fortunately the cauldron consumes only a minority of most players stock of iron,
the majority of it is used for making tools and armour.
True, but typically the player already has established a supply of iron through other means (ex. mining) before having an option to set up iron grinder or smelting any tools.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Dwarf gamer found:
Buildings - square, not round
Materials - from rubble mound
Dark caves - lit 'n' cleaned out
Settlements - deep underground
Farmability - to grinder bound
Shields - made creepers but sound
Axes and crossbows - taking mobs out
Offtopic but true
Dwarf gamer found:
Buildings - square, not round
Materials - from rubble mound
Dark caves - lit 'n' cleaned out
Settlements - deep underground
Farmability - to grinder bound
Shields - made creepers but sound
Axes and crossbows - taking mobs out
The availability of iron is relevant when we're talking about cauldrons.
Fortunately the cauldron consumes only a minority of most players stock of iron,
the majority of it is used for making tools and armour.
True, but typically the player already has established a supply of iron through other means (ex. mining) before having an option to set up iron grinder or smelting any tools.
Dwarf gamer found:
Buildings - square, not round
Materials - from rubble mound
Dark caves - lit 'n' cleaned out
Settlements - deep underground
Farmability - to grinder bound
Shields - made creepers but sound
Axes and crossbows - taking mobs out