Fossile fuel factorio (burner miner/smelter/inserter only)

[Lastmerlin]

I read at reddit about a challenge to make a factory with only burner miners/smelters and inserters and thought - lets give it a try. I also considered to get some mod for burner assemblers, but I did not really like them and was not sure, whether you can really craft everything with them. But I also did not use solar panels and logistic network, because this seemed fitting.

Whereas burner miner and smelter did not prove to be big problem, the inserters did. I played 0.12.35 - that means that the inserters never get any bonus when moving items from or to belt. I believe that playing 0.13 makes it a lot easier. If I read the changelogs correctly, there is a stack bonus for these situations now. But for my version, there is no way to improve the horrible speed of about 0.5 items/second. Hence you should forget about all the typical standard builds and standard ratios. Throughput is often limited by the inserters. Having no long-handed inserters does not help either. In addition, each line must have fuel or you have to power all inserters by additional, secondary inserters. Overall - a fun challenge.

As Mods I used a few convinience mods: Blue print flipper, extended reach (doubling the default reach), larger inventory, autofill (most useful one), module inserter. There are others, I did not bother to deactivate, but did no use (like anything train related).

Ressources were increased by one step for ores and two steps for coal and oil. Running out of fuel seemed really not fun to me. Biters were set to peaceful. I guess playing with default setting would be possible and not that much harder. But for me, the main fun was creating the new builds and hence I avoided any distractions.

Here are several pictures of my results:

Coal mining

Basic idea is to have a row of miners feeding each other and backfeeding to the last one. The problem is always that the inserters like to take out the last bit of fuel. Sadly, this build is not completely stable - I regularly and unpredictably encountered blackouts, where the whole system went dry.

ore mining

I sent in a belt with already one line fuel to the miners, which filled the other line. Of course, the idea is to sent this mixed belt directly to the smelters.

Ore smelting

Straightforward. Notice the pattern of additional secondary inserters feeding the primary ones and the additional fuel lines. This is one of my standard patterns.

Energy production

Really dirty. I have multiple such blocks. Sadly, these burners don't save as much energy as I hoped for.

Green circuits

I really like this design - it can be tiled in both directions and works with little downtimes.

Red,green science

Simple, once I had a proper central bus running.

Fuel production

Because coal was not reliable and plastics ate lots of it, I switched to solid fuel after a while almost completely. At the end, my main bus had three lines of fuel. I used so much light oil (this is only one such plant), that I had to convert some petroleum as well.

Inserter production

Ironically, inserter production is the product line most hurt by the restrictions. They are so fast and require so many inputs, that there is no hope of good utilization. I built 4 production lines, but each single assembler could work only 20% of the time.

Red circuits

My favorite build - efficient, quite compact and can be tiled in two directions.

Blue science

Slow recipe and hence rather simple. If you hate belt braiding - it would be easy to avoid, but I did not bother. Right now its hurt by the fact, that I redirected most red circuits to rocket part production. But before, I could run the typical 5/6/12 science build at almost full speed.

Blue circuits

Expandable in one direction and rather simple.

Rocket parts

I have 20 assembler each, but hardly had them all running full speed, because, as usual, there is always a problem

Rocket silo

First rocket was launched after 17 hours. Since then, I have invested another 4-5 hours for polishing and optimizing. Each rocket takes 15-20 minutes now. I have launched 14 so far. Anecdote about the satelite: I thought - this could be really slow and ugly - and that is I what I built. But then the damn solar panel turned out to be the bottleneck of the whole rocket production and I had to add more spaghetti to speed it up x( .

Overview

Base at largest zoom. You can see most of it, except a lot more miners, smelters, oil and energy production.

I hope you liked it!

Last remark: I played a regular game again today and was completely irritated by the fact, that I had to supply inserters with electricity :O . I could not unterstand this yellow flashing triangle error sign at once...

[Frightning]

There's an easier way to do the Coal mining (I used to use Burner miners for my coal a lot because I could refuel them at the source). They way you do it is to put an inserter right next to the exit (to the side) and then make the belt coming from the exit path in from of the inserter (so it can feed off of the output of the miner). If you made a few small adjustments to your layout, you could achieve similar results.

[Dry Hairy Tree]

That is outstanding work. I spent many hours trying to create what you have done and kept getting stuck till eventually i gave up thinking it couldn't be done with burner inserters all the way. I was wrong. Well played.

[Lastmerlin]

Thanks

I will try around a bit more and hope, that I can fix the coal miners. I guess the problem is taking out the coal with inserters. That is just not that smart.

Meanwhile - I found this nice mod here:
viewtopic.php?f=94&t=26870

No idea, why I missed this when starting, perhaps it was not finished then (looks very fresh). Perhaps I will try to change my factory to 100% fossile fuel. It does not require that much changes a think, as many assembler already have an input line with fuel on it. the most difficult one to fix is the red circuits build, as it is alreay quite complicated, and the red circuit assemblers get no fuel so far...

[Dry Hairy Tree]

I read somewhere here that a defunct (0.1 oil per second) oil derrick offers enough solid fuel to run a certain amount of power forever. This will equate to an infinite supply for your inserters etc as well. It's just working out how much you need, and making it happen.

I ran a map with a bunch of islands on it and in one game wanted to make maximum pollution while still running a functional factory. This stuff would have helped a great deal. The plan was to lure the aliens away from a main base by having them (try to) attack islands instead. Unfortunately as soon as the game got huge the lag set in so i canned it.

[kinnom]

this should have an achievement