Factorio Forums

Those 'circles' of burner mining drills used to get early coal can be bled off using a burner inserter to fuel up to 8 burner mining drill/stone smelter set-ups. It takes a while to prime, and is not entirely reliable e.g. between 6 and 8 drill/smelters working at any given time.

There is 3 extra burner inserters 'cycling' the coal from the 4th - 3rd (outlet) position - it seems to help The box is just a box of iron I got while testing this out, not necessary in any way.

Taking my sweet time with the sweet as new version 0.16. Looks great Gonna filthy it up with lots of early coal/belt chaos.

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That's pretty good. Your coal throughput, though, is limited by the inserters, pulling from the miners, and your iron output stock is limited by the size of the stack inside the smelter.


I used to use a design that was a bit more burner-inserter intensive.
I built large arrays of these things, thinking it was a good idea, because then I didn't have to defend power-lines from the biters. However, then I noticed the following data:

Burner Inserter: 188 kiloWatts.
Basic Inserter 13 kiloWatts (Drain 500 Watts)

Burner Miner: 300 kiloWatts. @ Speed 0.5 units/second ->600 kJ/unit
Electric Miner: 90 kiloWatts. @ speed 0.75 units/second ->120 kJ/unit

Now, since the boiler to produce steam is only 50% efficient, it means the basic electric inserter is about (188/13*.5)=7.2 times more efficient than the burner inserter. The electric miner is (600/120*.5)=2.5 times more efficient than the burner miner.

In short, burner inserters and burner miners are a good way to run through all your coal resources quickly, and generate lots of pollution! But it's still fun to figure out how to set them up for automation.

You see, but by defenition this is automation, and by defenition pre-automation is the time before automation, so this cannot be pre-automation automation because creating automation is the end of the pre-automation age.

Egad. Once again, I am defeated by semantics.

I just realized that you could be referring to the research automation, in which case this is completely correct as it does not make use of of long handed inserters or assemblers, or any dependancy of either item or the research.

Pretty cool!
And I thought this couldn't be done!

Pre-automation automation

Well, the problem is, you have made automation where there is none, therefore, there is?

I guess the main thing is it is pre electric grid. And also it's made of stuff that can be made in level 1 assemblers. So in that way its pre automation 2 automation.

I did a lot of this on a marathon playthrough since it takes forever to get electricity... that's when I discovered how ridiculously much coal burner inserters can chew up!