Choose the production of mining drills

[Jim-Bar]

At least we all agree on the behavior of the mining drills when put on uranium ore: they should not block if there is another ore available but no sulfuric acid. Right?

[mrvn]

I would suggest not putting the filter next to every miner which produces multiple ores, but instead make a series of filter inserters further along, once you have merged the miner belts.

I agree, I just quickly added overlapping mining drills with chests and inserters next to them for the sake of the picture.

This way they can feed into chests, or onto other belts (or in the case of coal, directly to a small power plant if you like, I did that by one iron/coal patch a while back because I was bored).

I never thought of putting the coal into power plants, but that's a good idea. The problem with chests is that they're likely to end up full, then the coal passes through and messes up the smelters.

It also goes through if there is too much coal for the inserter to pick up. Use a bit of circuit logic: Connect the belt under the inserter with the next one. Have the first one read an hold content and the later one stop if coal > 0. That way the belt will block as long as there is coal to remove. I also recommend connecting a speaker to the chest and sound an alarm when full.

Other fun things to do:

- Use burner mining drills because they only mine a 2x2 area. Easier to place them on one ore only. If coal is involved use the coal to power burner mining drills. One coal miner can keep many burner mining drills running.

- Place miner partly on coal but mainly on iron/copper. Feed the output into smelter as is. Then at the end remove excess coal. Or loop it back to the start of the smelter and add/remove coal to keep a constant average of coal on the belt.