Remove, or make scalable, burner miners/inserters

[ahydra447]

TL;DR

Burner miners and burner inserters are the only items that don't scale into the lategame. Could they be removed?

What ?

The beginning of the game is rather tedious with having to run to get coal, feed iron/copper/stone burner drills and furnaces with coal, collect resources from furnaces, rinse and repeat. Eventually you get to a point where you can afford steam engines + enough belts to start electric mining - and now your burner equipment is more than useless (it takes up valuable inventory space).

Furthermore, there is no use for it at any further point in the game. Even the lowly small power pole has its uses in the lategame, but literally all you want to do with your burner equipment is stuff it in a chest and shoot it

My proposal is: remove the burner phase of the game. Start people off with a pump, a boiler, two steam engines, two mining drills and 20 power poles, or something like that. It speeds up the beginning of the game by like 30-60minutes, where this period otherwise just feels like performing a rote task rather than the more immersive gameplay that requires planning ahead for the later factory and for avoiding too much pollution. Indeed my brother and I got so tired of doing the initial phase of the game that we always play with a quick start mod that basically does exactly this, just with more of each item and a decent amount of belts.

As an alternative suggestion, introduce some midgame+ items that require burner equipment. For example, some sort of hybrid mining drill with a faster mine speed but requires electrics + fuel to run, or introduce a burner drill into the recipe for oil refineries, etc.

Why ?

Increase replayability: get into the meat of the game much faster, and not feel like you have a bunch of tedious stuff to repeat if you leave one corner of your base uncovered and a bunch of biters rush in and wreck stuff after an hour's gameplay.

[SyncViews]

I think it should be optional, the burner phase is a nice start for new players as you need less things to make something actually work. Electricity means at a minimum, a pump, boiler, steam engine, pipes, power poles. For practical purposes underground pipes, belts, inserters, electric mining drill.


New game "starting stage" map options would be nice however. I'll have to admit that often now I "cheat" myself such an option, at least first assembly and logistics techs, and enough starting items for power, electric mines, and a full furnace + assembler layout.

factorio-start.png (133.02 KiB) Viewed 2476 times

Enough to get something like that quickly, literally cutting out an hour or so. Some games I started at the construction-bot roboport phase even.

[<NO_NAME>]

Burner inserters are still useful in late-game to put coal into boilers. It allows to automatically resume power production after temporary coal shortage.

[bobingabout]

I use burner inserters a lot, even in late game. Look at my tutorials on youtube and I explain it somewhere, I'm not sure which one I explain it in, it's either "Getting started" which was more of me practicing making a tutorial, or Electronics.
But basically as previously mentioned, having your boiler fueling inserters powered by electricity is a bad idea, because brown outs will slow and eventually stop fuel insertion, leading to blackouts. Burner inserters aren't affected by this. (Even though they're a bit too slow for wood fuel use, not an issue in base game, but in bob's, one of my games I decided to fuel my power plant from wood from my greenhouses, because my starting area didn't have a lot of coal, and I needed it for other things.)
For similar reasons, a burner miner drill could be useful as a backup coal supply, so when the electric mining drills cut out, the burner mining drills fire up, though this is less useful late game when you're probably either solid fuel or better, or have replaced your power plant with nuclear or solar.

But... we do have several items that are dead ends... Burner mining drills and inserters, Steel furnaces, pretty much ALL the armors, shotgun... there's probably more too.

[steinio]

-1

[bobucles]

There were some cool ideas about upgrading burner equipment with fuel. For example if the "acceleration" bonus were used, then each new stage of fuel would make them faster.

There isn't much of a use case for it though. Electric equipment is just too good.

[ahydra447]

-1

46 - 3.7i

I use burner inserters a lot, even in late game. Look at my tutorials on youtube and I explain it somewhere, I'm not sure which one I explain it in, it's either "Getting started" which was more of me practicing making a tutorial, or Electronics.
But basically as previously mentioned, having your boiler fueling inserters powered by electricity is a bad idea, because brown outs will slow and eventually stop fuel insertion, leading to blackouts. Burner inserters aren't affected by this. (Even though they're a bit too slow for wood fuel use, not an issue in base game, but in bob's, one of my games I decided to fuel my power plant from wood from my greenhouses, because my starting area didn't have a lot of coal, and I needed it for other things.)
For similar reasons, a burner miner drill could be useful as a backup coal supply, so when the electric mining drills cut out, the burner mining drills fire up, though this is less useful late game when you're probably either solid fuel or better, or have replaced your power plant with nuclear or solar.

But... we do have several items that are dead ends... Burner mining drills and inserters, Steel furnaces, pretty much ALL the armors, shotgun... there's probably more too.

True that burner inserters are a reasonable choice for fuelling steam setups. We prefer electric inserters as they're more efficient, and use plenty of circuit network shenanigans to sound loud alarms and cut off the non-essential parts of the factory if the fuel supply runs low. When solid fuel / mass solar comes it's hardly ever a problem.

Of the other items you mentioned, burner equipment is by far the quickest to become obsolete. Steel furnaces last quite a while since electric ones are very expensive, and each tier of armour beyond the heavy armour is pretty pricey too. (Indeed we tend to skip over power armour mkI for that reason) Shotgun I've never used, preferring to let turrets and tanks do all the hard work.

The main reason I think this would be a good change is just to speed the early game up. Could be made into an option like "quick start" or something so you still have the option of building from the very beginning if you like the early grind / are playing deathworld / etc.