Burner inserters should be able to refule themselfes

[ray4ever]

In every game I play I tend to skip burner inserters completely and directly go for electric inserters as I find it extremely tedious to manually refill them with coal. That's why i suppose to enable burner inserters to refill themselves if they are facing a tile (belt) with coal on it. That way burner inserters would be useable in conjunction with normal furnaces for smelting purposes.

[ssilk]

I mean this setup with burners (inserters&miner) is it worth to be tried out on far away resource fields, near to coal or so. For that case, the burner needs to be able to be filled by logistic bots (which also fill the needed turrets). The only electricity is then for the roboport, but that looks for me solvable with solar panels only, because the roboport has a big battery. 5-10 solar panels should be enough.

[BurnHard]

Even on very far away resource fields you will want to have at least fast inserters to fill the train waggons and the buffer chests. With burner miners you have no way to cover the whole resource field, you need electric ones for that.

Hands down, the burner inserters and miners will have to get seriously buffed or their function altered in some way, or they stay the "crappy things" that are replaced after the first 10 minutes of a game.

[Sedado77]

Hands down, the burner inserters and miners will have to get seriously buffed or their function altered in some way, or they stay the "crappy things" that are replaced after the first 10 minutes of a game.

That's the point. they're a trnsicional item, for helping unload the first 1 or 2 furnances and unload the resources to a chest or belt before we get electric power... i'll say is't FOR building the electrical power...
How long do you use burner miners?? i only build 2 of them... coal and iron. and only to get enough metal for pipes and steam engines... and they're the 1st thing that gets replaced...

I didn't even build burner inserters in my last games...

[Coolthulhu]

The problem with burner inserters is that by the time they are worth the iron and coal they cost, they are already useless.
Before you have ~4 electric mines, it's more efficient to just point mines at furnaces and insert coal stacks manually instead of bothering with costly belts and inserters. Once you have 4 electric mines, you can afford the normal inserters.

Having burner inserters that aren't totally dependent on player micromanaging them would make them useful for things like

• Restarting boilers after total coal starvation (possible now, but requires a very ugly setup to be reliable)
• Refilling distant gun turrets
• Refilling distant burner mines
• Filling in those some of those annoying gaps in electric network without having a dense web of copper wires everywhere

Currently, they are useful for things like

• Allowing building menu tutorial before electric network tutorial

They become almost completely useless before they even become useful. They might as well not exist, nobody would miss them.

[ssilk]

And they are inefficient, use 10-20 time more energy. They are there just to close a tutorial gap.

[bird2750]

Yes please. They are just terrible.