Burner mining drill

[Atreides]

If placed on coal, shouldn't it fuel itself?
I've placed a drill on coal but it justs stops after mining one coal, it doesn't stack it.
Why?

[emb3r]

The burner drill does not fuel itself, you must feed it coal.

[Atreides]

Okay, then the wiki[wiki.factorio.com] is wrong?

"Since v0.10.0 if placed on coal (any Fuel, but only coal makes sense) the burner mining drill uses some coal to feed it into itself. (Note also, that with v0.10 the Burner inserters have changed so, that they can feed themselves.)"

[Atreides]

The inserters does feed themselves but the drill doesn't, is this the way it's intended?

[emb3r]

I have noticed significant discrepencies in the wiki referencing older version numbers. None of my machines fuel themselves. I cannot speak for dev's intentions regarding this. I did not expect the driller or inserter to fuel itself without player interaction.

[Nellvan]

That info is either oudated or just a plain mistake.

Technically, drills just dump the stuff on the ground, it is never "inside" the machine, thus they are unable to fuel themselves. You need inserters to do this, and you can chain this from one drill to the next.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=639859603

[Pettingson]

Indeed, if you have given the burner inserters it's initial coal it will feed itself if it does not run out of coal before the next one. Say it's moving another type of resource while the coal has yet to come past it.

I have yet to see any other machines feed themselves though. I was happily impressed when it fed itself and that it prioritized it

[Omnicast]

I don't have the game, but I played the demo and watched some videos. The BEST way for burner mining drills to feed "themselves" is to have one drill feed another drill which eventually feeds the first one. Smallest setup requires a minimum of two drills.

Basically you loop it. You can then add a inserter to remove the coal from the drill and put it onto a belt. Even if the inserters remove all the coal in the drill it's attached to it will still run after another drill feeds into it.

[icanfly342]

No need for inserters, they feed themselfes if you do this:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=639872769

You can connect many more like this in a circle 4, 6, 8.....
I have this for a while before I switch to belts and inserters.
Just run by, hold "STRG"+left click on them and you have the coal in your inventory.

[Nellvan]

Never thought of that before, even though I've used drills feeding iron ore directly into a smelter

Add inserters and a belt as Ommnicast described if you want to get started on automation, and you still got a nice big buffer in form of the drills fuel storage... yep, that's even better.

[Full Metal Satori]

the burner inserter arms should feed themselves so long as they have a piece of mined coal on a coneyor infront of them.

[T-Bone Biggins]

Just put 2 or 4 burner drills facing each other on the outputs over coal all right next to the other, each one will fuel the other and then you can just walk up and press ctrl+click to collect the coal. This way you have drills that require zero maintenence.

[IamNic]

I personally prefer this setup: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=633578735

[mid endian]

if only we could make a coal power plant that feeds itself.

[Xuhybrid]

If you place 4 or 2 feeding into each other at the start of a new game, you will be good on Coal for a while.

[Neccarus]

I strongly recommend you skip as much of the burner stuff as possible and move onto a steam powered setup ASAP. Main reason being that burners are hugely inefficient, just look at the energy usage of a burner drill beside an electric one and you will see what I mean.

However, this stuff is nice to know for the beggining, and I tend to have 1 burner on each resource to get me started.