Factorio Forums

In my experience when you start the game you build two or three burner miners, maybe some burner inserters and after that you try to go to electricity as fast as possible. This makes these more or less useless, as you will never use them later again.
So I would suggest make them more usefull by delaing the introduction into the electrical age by making electricity a reasearch, wich is not one of the firsts. This of course would also require some new technologies / buildings like the "Burner Reaserch Station" or "Burner Assembly Machine". At the same time to make the electrical age felt in all areas, it comes now with a electrical train, which needs overhead lines, that can possibly also be used to connect different areas with energy as an alternative to electrical poles.
This may feel at first a bit like more "grinding" but I think could give the game an additional feeling of progress that affects all areas instead of just adding more machines.
I know this is not very detailed, as there could be added much more to this, but this is supposed to be more a general idea thing.

+1

The current pre-electricity game is more like a chore that you have to get through, not really anything interesting. Burner insterters have some extremely limited use later on, but the whole setup is extremely temporary.

What about making electricity a second-tier tech, ie needing green science?

Related, there should be an option for an "advanced start", that can skip at least part of the boring first phase if you just want to have fun with the later part of the game. This is even more pressing if the steam age is extended. Maybe one where you can start building electricity right away (so start with more resources and possibly the electricity tech), and an option where you can start blueprinting right away (so with a personal roboport or maybe a single normal roboport in inventory).

There was a mod that added burner versions of different buildings: [Mod 0.11.20] Steampunk V 0.1.1
It won't work with the current 0.12.20/21, although I think it wouldn't be that difficult to update it.

EDIT: was easier than expected, see [0.12.20+] Steampunk v0.2.0

In my opinion this is a "modification of the original game target" and so I think it's a much better idea to make a mod out of it.
Which means, that I don't think it's currently a good idea to add it to the vanilla. Which doesn't mean, that this is not a good idea, cause it is (And not the first one, but the others are really difficult to find).