Factorio Forums

Recently I've been in need of a burner-powered radar for a mod of mine, but discovered that there's no way to actually fuel them in the game, neither manually nor with console commands. This got me to test burner energy with more entity types. Here's what I found:

Burner assemblers and labs work well.
Burner radars, lamps and pumps don't work. Inserters try to fuel them but fail.
Burner beacons don't work either, and inserters don't even bother trying to put fuel in them.

The screenshot below shows the test, with inserters trying to insert coal from chests. Labs and assemblers work, radars, beacons, lamps and pumps don't:



(as a side note, it's also impossible to make burner laser turrets, roboports, and combinators. They automatically switch to electricity.)

On the one side, some items make no sense with burning fuel in reality, but on the other side, the energy_source parameter seems inconsistent.
I guess because of this the locomotives also can not use electricity.

Yeah, things like roboports and laser turrets are unlikely to use burner energy outside of some esoteric mods. On the other hand, there already are mods that implement hacky solutions to have electric trains and burner lamps, and I stumbled upon this when I tried to make a burner radar. The fix would really only be to accomodate mods.

Not all entities support burner energy source types. Specific code has to be put in the entity for that to function correctly - that's by design.

Also this is more of a mod interface request since the only time this would happen is if it was modded.

I might look into these types of things for 0.14 but it's definitely not a bug and not something I want to work on in the middle of the 0.13 stabilization phase.