Burner inserter should take the first coal itself

[ssilk]

Title says all: When placing an burner inserter, it should be able to take up a piece of fuel by himself (out of a chest or a belt) to fill his burner.

In other words: He has one free fuel-filling turn, after being built. He stops also one turn, before it completely runs out of fuel (the "no fuel" sign is then showed, too), to be able to put up one fuel.

Or more other words: When built the inserter has enough initial energy in his storage, that he can rotate one turn, but he will use this power only for feeding itself. And before energy is completely empty it will stop again to use this energy only for feeding itself with fuel. The "no fuel" sign will be shown in this state, too.

The sense of this is, that this will continue to enhance the usages of burner inserter for the late game.

[xnmo]

Less tedium is always an improvement, though I don't know if getting free energy is the best solution. One way you could balance this would be for the recipe to require one coal or wood. Then when you place it has a full bar of energy which it can use to fuel itself.

Is it possible for a recipe to have variable requirements? So that it doesn't matter if you don't have coal on you, as long as you have wood.

Or another solution would be to have wood or coal taken out of your inventory automatically when you place the burner inserter. Perhaps this is a more elegant way of dealing with this problem.

Unfortunately I don't think this would allow burner inserters to be useful after electricity is available. The advantage regular inserters have over them is that they use much much less energy than a burner inserter. I believe they use an equal amount of energy in operation as a furnace, which seems kind of overkill if you ask me
This same reason is why I do not use burner mining drills later on; you save coal by simply using electricity.

[ssilk]

Is it possible for a recipe to have variable requirements? So that it doesn't matter if you don't have coal on you, as long as you have wood.

Hm. I thought it has something like an inbuilt spring, which is "winded up" when built. You can think of this also like a second bar below the fuel bar, that goes down only, when loading fuel and is immediately reloaded, when it has fuel.

This same reason is why I do not use burner mining drills later on; you save coal by simply using electricity.

It has definitely it's uses. For example for gun-turrets or filling up burners for steam-engine. Everything, where you need only some movements per minute. And it costs much less: The burner inserter is quite cheap and you don't need to set poles. It definetely saves you resources!

The biggest reason, why I wanted it is, that it makes quite much sense to set up gun-turrets by requester chests. Requester chest requests ammo and fuel and you can feed 4 gun turrets with it. But (!) you need to wait or go back, after it is built (by the construction bots) to feed one coal in the inserters, which is a kind of stupid.

[MF-]

So you covertly sugest,
that burner inserters should always reserve the last move for refuelling?
Sounds useful and reasonable I guess...

Depends on which items the inserter actually grabs.
Does it take fuel with priority when it's slot is empty now?

PS: This self-refueling seems bit too mechanically complicated at the game start,
perhaps it might be turned into a researchable?

[ssilk]

This self-refueling seems bit too mechanically complicated at the game start,
perhaps it might be turned into a researchable?

A quite good idea, if it will cost only a handful of resources.

[Marbles]

Doesn't the burner inserter already fuel itself when it's available?

[Boogieman14]

Doesn't the burner inserter already fuel itself when it's available?

Yes, but only if it has fuel. The first time you place it, you have to manually feed it something. That's the issue ssilk would like to see addressed.

[MeduSalem]

Count me in on supporting this... ^^

Since I'm heavily using Steam Power myself in lategame (I just refuse to play with Solar Farms) I just hate the first-time setup of burner inserters. It is fun in the first few game minutes of a new map, but once you are in about 50 hours for a single map and need to double or tripple the power production by adding another 200 steam engines it gets quite tedious to fuel every single inserter once by hand. xD

PS: This self-refueling seems bit too mechanically complicated at the game start,
perhaps it might be turned into a researchable?

I actually think this is a good idea!

[The Phoenixian]

So you covertly sugest,
that burner inserters should always reserve the last move for refuelling?
Sounds useful and reasonable I guess...

Depends on which items the inserter actually grabs.
Does it take fuel with priority when it's slot is empty now?

PS: This self-refueling seems bit too mechanically complicated at the game start,
perhaps it might be turned into a researchable?

I've thought about it before and I think this would be easy enough to do this in a way that seems both natural and low tech: If the inserter needs a bit less energy to fuel itself than it does to insert into any other object then you can have it's initial fuel just slightly too low to insert into another object, which will also happen to be just enough to insert into itself.

That said, I think we need to ask why we need it to only be able to fuel itself with the initial energy. Yes you could cheese it but is there any situation in which you would want to? (Right now I can concive of two situations where it could be cheesed, both of which are a waste of player time: repeatedly placing manually to pick up non-fuel items, and directing the continual contruction and removal of burner inserters with blueprint and decontruction orders.)

[Cordylus]

I think it's a very good idea! I'm using burner inserters very often, and it really helps me.

[Peter34]

Less tedium is always an improvement, though I don't know if getting free energy is the best solution. One way you could balance this would be for the recipe to require one coal or wood. Then when you place it has a full bar of energy which it can use to fuel itself.

Each item-movement by a Burner Inserter costs around 1/50 of the fuel energy of a single lump of Coal. So in terms of giving the player free energy, the amount given is ridiculously small. Nothing to worry about, really.

[tecxx]

i support this suggestion, mainly because it's just tedious to fill the inserter after placing. i don't know any situation where i would place it and then NOT fill it. so taking these additional clicks out would be a welcome improvement.