Furnaces not accepting coal as material

[Nanotect]

Hello there,

I am working on a mod that allows you to turn coal into cokes using a furnace, like they do in real life. When I place coal into a furnace, it does what it has to do, but when I try to automate it with inserters, they only place the coal into the fuel slot, not the source inventory slot.

I was wondering if anyone knows where I can find the file that controls stuff like that or just how to solve it (like adding a new furnace or item if necessary). I would be really grateful if anyone could help me with this.

[AutoDMC]

I don't have an answer to your direct question, but a thought; Why not add a "grinder" building which takes coal and electricity and produces coal granules, which being a custom item can be placed into the furnace to turn into coke?

I'm curious what you will use coke for. Is it just a more powerful fuel?

[AutoDMC]

What about electric furnaces? Because they don't take coal as fuel, will inserters put coal into the recipe slot?

I poked around in the lua data available in the Factorio install, and I don't see anything controlling the behavior of inserters there.

The only stuff I found in the API is the "insert" and "can_insert" calls on an entity: http://lua-api.factorio.com/0.12.33/Lua ... can_insert

The documentation implies that what an inserter considers the "best inventory" to place in a slot is hard-coded somewhere, but that's an implication, not fact.

Still curious what coke is for! It sounds cool.

[Sean Mirrsen]

As far as I understand it, coke would actually be the only good way to smelt iron out of iron ore, realistically, so perhaps it's that (there's a lot of sulfur impurities otherwise).

As to the actual problem, I think right now the only solution is either making raw coal a non-fuel item, or adding an intermediate step where it would be turned into a non-fuel item in an electric assembly machine.

[bobingabout]

I think the issue of coal not being smeltable is specific to the burner furnaces. I for example have a "Chemical boiler" in my mod which in code is a burner assembling machine, which takes coal as an ingredient, and an inserter will load coal as both fuel and an ingredient without issue.
I think the problem with the furnace is that since the recipe choice is automatic, and it can go in the fuel slot, the game assumes that's the only place it can go.

[Arch666Angel]

As far as I understand it, coke would actually be the only good way to smelt iron out of iron ore, realistically, so perhaps it's that (there's a lot of sulfur impurities otherwise).

As to the actual problem, I think right now the only solution is either making raw coal a non-fuel item, or adding an intermediate step where it would be turned into a non-fuel item in an electric assembly machine.

Coke is better than coal for that job, because the coke has a higher pure carbon percentage than coal and you want the carbon as reaction partner for the iron oxide. Using coal will add other impurities to the smelted iron. There are other modern ways to process the ore but since coal is cheap it is still used (and therefore blast furnaces) for example in china. In western countries most of the iron comes actually from scrap metal.