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please allow the player to read the fuel count of burner mining drills

Posted: Sun Jul 06, 2025 12:41 am
by herra
if you connect a green or red wire to a burner mining drill then you can only read the ores beneath it, not the fuel. for other buildings you can read all items that are in it so this sticks out as an oversight.
not being able to read the fuel means if you're using inserters to take coal out of burner miner "snakes" (chains of miners inserting coal into eachother) then you must throttle them with a clock belt or something of the sort
i know the burner phase is not an emhpasis, especially for veteran players, but since players are able to use circuits at the start i fell like it should be fleshed out

Re: please allow the player to read the fuel count of burner mining drills

Posted: Sun Jul 06, 2025 12:44 am
by Henir
+1

Re: please allow the player to read the fuel count of burner mining drills

Posted: Sun Oct 12, 2025 12:58 pm
by j_matya
+1

Our use-case: We are working on an Any% Multiplayer Speedrun, and would like to continue getting value out of the "Coal Snake" Burner Miners, which we have already "paid for" with resources.
Unfortunately they cannot be automated :o in our intended way for the purpose of extract coal from their fuel-inventory, but ONLY if they have enough to function on their own.
For now we have to keep them as a memento of early game while we rush towards the rocket, and invest in more expensive (and due to research, time-wise later tech) electric miners.

The options presented for circuit networks of a burner miner are those of a common miner, which allows reading resource of the miner's reach or that of the patch.
factorio_burner_miner_no_read_fuel.png
factorio_burner_miner_no_read_fuel.png (746.09 KiB) Viewed 223 times


However, if we compare it to a stone furnace, which does allow fueling by burnable, we can see that there is the possibility to read only the fuel contained within.
factorio_stone_furnace_read_fuel.png
factorio_stone_furnace_read_fuel.png (919.65 KiB) Viewed 223 times


Our argument would be that since the burner miner is also acting like a furnace (it consumes burnable to perform their operation), it may be within reasons ;) to ask for this feature, if not even consider it a bug.

Thanks folks!

Re: please allow the player to read the fuel count of burner mining drills

Posted: Sun Oct 12, 2025 2:54 pm
by hyspeed
+1

Re: please allow the player to read the fuel count of burner mining drills

Posted: Sun Oct 12, 2025 5:21 pm
by michelguenette
+1

We were discussing this during a recent stream.

We just want to prevent starving the snake or loop of burner miners, while pulling out some surplus fuel for other uses.