mining drill bug?

[Majorio]

hello I did not catch if this is a bug or a feature because I do not have time to study all forums and I haven´t played this game for a while...
few months ago the drills has only max consumption of electricity and when belts was full, the drills just stop working and was no consumption at all... now I need to solve this problem with power switches otherwise it´s a waste of huge amount of energy (coal, etc..) In this case should be fine put info that drills have the same min and max consumption of electricity
for player like me 1,7K hours in factorio its not a problem it´s opportunity, but for newcomers might be an issue...just let you know...cya

[boskid]

Given this bug report does not follow 3638 by at least providing game version, and since it contains a question, i am going to classify this as a Gameplay help.

Drill does not consume energy when output blocked.

04-09-2025, 10-04-04.png (566.09 KiB) Viewed 270 times

04-09-2025, 10-04-26.png (524.51 KiB) Viewed 270 times

[Majorio]

yeah whatever...just let you know that´s happening to me

[computeraddict]

Max consumption is not the same as actual consumption.

[torne]

The information that appears in the sidebar when you point at a machine does not tell you the current electricity consumption - only the maximum (and minimum if it's not zero), so nothing in your screenshot shows how much power it's consuming right now.

You need to look in the electric network info panel (by clicking on one of the electric poles) to see the current consumption, but this shows you the total for everything connected to the network and can't isolate individual machines. See the screenshot in boskid's post for an example where they created a network that only has one drill to demonstrate the different consumption clearly.

If you mean the green bar labeled "Electricity" that isn't the consumption either - that is the amount of electricity currently stored in the machine's internal buffer. This is always full for most machines, unless you aren't producing enough power.

If there's something else that you see that's making it seem like the drill is consuming power when it's not working, then you will have to tell us what it is - everything in your screenshot looks normal.