Make burner inserters more useful

[drarfwithgun]

Summary: I think burner insterters should be able to pull coal to fuel themselves out of furnaces.

Reasoning: Burner Inserters have a limited number applications where they are useful or efficient. The primary one is in very dense steam power setups, however most players switch to solar as soon as possible. There are others, but basic or fast inserters almost always make more sense. Consequently, factories always wind up with huge stockpiles of coal. I'm currently building a factory where I'm trying to generate as much pollution and burn as much coal as possible. In pursuit of this goal, I want to use burner inserters any place where the speed required to make the given furnace of assembler work can be achieved with a burner inserter. Currently, burner inserters cannot pull fuel from a furnace, even if it has a surplus of fuel inside of it. If burner inserters were able to do this, then I would be able to convert all inserters in my smelting stack to burner inserters, and blanket the world in smog.

Eager to hear thoughts.

[ssilk]

What you describe is not a problem of the burners, but of the furnace. You can take out only from the output stacks. That's much easier with burners: They have only one stack, which can be used as input AND output.

I think this suggestion is not possible, cause it changes basic game-play. But maybe you have some idea?!

[drarfwithgun]

What you describe is not a problem of the burners, but of the furnace. You can take out only from the output stacks. That's much easier with burners: They have only one stack, which can be used as input AND output.

I think this suggestion is not possible, cause it changes basic game-play. But maybe you have some idea?!

My first idea would be to make an exception for burner inserters. After all, the player can take coal out of the input slots of a furnace.

[ssilk]

Devs would say "It takes another IF-construction in the burner inserter handler routines". And other players might say: "Who has had this idea: Now my whole setup is not longer working..."

Besides that: can you show us your setup and why you think this is really needed.

[MalcolmCooks]

I think this is a good idea..... but it has been suggested for as long as I have been playing (since .11) so unfortunately I think that if they were ever going to change this, they would have already

[BenSeidel]

I don't think this would take too much of a change. If instead of the fuel being an independant slot, integrate it to be an input slot. Then the only thing that would need "special code" would be the construct that uses the coal, of which they already have as they automatically select what recipe to make. If there were hidden recipes that used coal - they could select those instead. Then the only other change would be to alter the behaviour of the inserter arm to allow removing of input items as well as output items IF filtered in some way. So no filter, current behaviour, filtered, remove input items as well. Because an inserter inserting into a furnace or assembler is filtered anyway, this should work.

[Mehve]

Not that I'm stopping you from polluting your world as much as possible but burner inserters aren't a very good way to go about it. While the other inserters don't directly make pollution, they still indirectly cause pollution by the generation of their required electricity.

[ssilk]

Well, burner inserters are super useful if they are seldom used. Best example: fill magazines into gun turrets. Or the last two emergency boilers in your water heater cascade, that are nearly never used but they guarantee backup power to restart the steam engines. They don't have any energy usage if they don't move, no power drain, unlike the electric inserters, so for that case burners are much more efficient. And useful.

And cause of that they are poorly useable in a setup, where they need to move all the time, see above, power efficiency is not their thing.
So with this suggestion the player is brought a bit more into the wrong direktion. "Oh, they take the coal also from furnace? Fine. I can make my setup much more efficient."

Wrong way...

[Kamikatze]

Basically this is the same subject, so I joined them -- ßilk

Hi everyone,

I was playing a burner-only game with the mod Burn the world and noticed that even with BurnerLeech I couldn't take fuel out of a burner inserter with another inserter.
It feels a bit like a break in continuity since a burner inserter does have an inventory and registers as a drop_target, but not as pickup_target.

I think a mod should be able to make leeching fuel from inserters possible.

PS: With the factorio board style the white cursor is barely visible in the light grey background of the highlighted text area