Soot sprites on the Ice levels in the mines. Even better if you can find a loot doubler ring.
Just keep swinging away. You’ll get your coal. You’ll get all you could ever need. The dust will never wash away. You will always see the black stains, hear the feeble cries…
Also, you can take the elevator and jump between floors 45, 55, 65 and 75 and once you cleared all the sprites go to 0 to reset the mines and repeat. Saves you huge amount of time of finding the stairs every floor.
I just went back to Minecraft after probably a decade of not playing it, they made coal so effing hard to find now. I’m mostly using charcoal.
But it’s still easier than stardew
I’ve always used charcoal.
Sure, coal was easier to find, but charcoal is renewable, and I like that.
Even ignoring that, 8 logs becomes 7 charcoal, and planting is trivial, so its just faster to farm trees in the long run. Coal is for villagers that demand it, specifically, in early trades.
Now for smelting I like bamboo, you can fully automate it. Technically you can fully automate kelp now too with the crafter, but bamboo is easy. Just break it like sugarcane and funnel it to your furnace directly, done.