Factorio Forums

Everytime i launch a new playthrough, all I do is rush to electric mine first. This made me realize how useless the burner tech is and I went ahead in the game files to modify the tech tree.

I placed electric drills (+yellow inserters) after green science
I pushed fast inserters after green science

I'm wondering if this makes sense, basically forcing me into an early game burner tech era. Or is this completely stupid and I should give up and keep rushing electric drills first upgrade.

As a side note, i play on deathworld marathon 600. So im wondering if this change would make it literally impossible.

Burner machinery is intentionally “not as good” as the Electric machinery to incentivize you to Upgrade. It sounds like they are working exactly as Intended! You will generally never use the Burner machines again - I try to craft only the minimum required to get to Electricity when “bootstrapping”.

The Quality system does (eventually) breathe new life into Burner Inserter: at Legendary quality they have a turning speed of 702deg/second, comparable to a Fast Inserter (Normal) while having a much simpler recipe. I like to use them anywhere that Throughput is not critical, like handling Spoilage removal from machines: they will often self-burn the low-energy material instead of sending it onwards to the furnaces.

AAI Industry extends the Burner phase of the game as part of its mildly increased complexity. This is a common Mod idea; I just think this one does it best.

Burner inserters are also useful for heating on Aquilo. I remember it's self-thawing.

For spoilage removal though, won't the inserter getting stuck mid-swing after burning through the ultra-low-energy spoilage?

h.q.droid wrote: Fri Jun 27, 2025 3:32 pmFor spoilage removal though, won't the inserter getting stuck mid-swing after burning through the ultra-low-energy spoilage?

1 Spoilage (250kJ) powers a Legendary Burner Inserter for about 2 Swings. If you force the Hand Size to 1 they will eat about 40% of the Spoilage themselves.

I use burner inserters for a few pieces of critical infrastructure:

• Burner inserters feeding coal to boilers ensures that excessive power demand won’t slow down the fuel insertion and lead to blackout.
• Burner inserters feeding ammo to gun turrets ensures that borders stay defended even if I accidentally remove a power pole and cut off power to the area.

These aren’t resource-efficient but they keep worse things from happening. There are other ways they could be handled (both use cases could be replaced with careful solar power) but they’re simple to set up.

The best use I've come up with is inserting fuel into trains.
I've always found it annoying to run power to inserters for refueling trains. My trains are powered with nuclear fuel, not sure how long one fuel powers a burner inserter but it's an extremely long time.

Also as others have said, on aquilo because they don't freeze.

You are kinda right, in every game in 1.1 I always rushed electricity. Because of this I never really saw the point of having the burners in the game when they were already obsolete from the beginning.

I like that they put Electric mining drill behind a research in 2.0 but considering how powerful of an upgrade it really is I wouldnt mind if they increased the research cost by a factor 10 at least. Imo every technology should be a consideration instead of a given.