Feeding coal to drills (newbie question)

[war4peace]

Hi all,
I'm puzzled by one thing.
I have read the wiki and seen screenshots, and it looks like burner drills and stone forges should be fueled by inserters. In my game, they are not.

I have created a simple setup with an inserter picking coal from a belt and feeding into a drill, only it doesn't feed it at all. Same goes for inserters feeding Forges with coal. they don't.

Now, inserters can and do feed forges with other products, for example I have an inserter feeding a forge with Iron plates to obtain Steel plates, and that works, but coal... I have to run around manually filling them with coal which is a wee bit annoying.

Screenshot below.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=801030139

Am I thinking it the wrong way?

[KatherineOfSky]

The inserters do add coal to miners & furnaces. However, they only transfer about 5 pieces or so. They don't "fill" it to the brim. Your setup looks fine.

Is the mining drill running out of fuel?

[fractalgem]

Seconding that your setup looks fine.

That said, it's actually fastest to stick to hand-loading the things until you've got about 5 of each of iron, copper, and coal miners going, and one or two stone miners; automation has a relatively high startup cost in terms of materials. You can also point coal miners at eachother and they'll fuel eachother.

After that, stick everything on a belt and do the smelting a little ways away from the ore patch; you'll get electric and long-arm inserters not too far into the tech tree.

[war4peace]

I see. I was expecting the inserted to fill the forge to the brim. I never left it running out of coal.
I'll test some more tonight.

Thank you for your answers!

[fractalgem]

Originally posted by war4peace:

I see. I was expecting the inserted to fill the forge to the brim. I never left it running out of coal.
I'll test some more tonight.

Thank you for your answers!

They will, however, fill smelters to the brim in terms of iron/copper ore and plates, which can be a bit confusing as everything else only fills a little bit. (e.g. assemblers will only get filled to enough stuff for 2 crafts and will stop requesting stuff if their output gets about 2 crafts worth of stuff, but smelters will frequently wind up with a full stack in the input. )

[KatherineOfSky]

Originally posted by fractalgem:

They will, however, fill smelters to the brim in terms of iron/copper ore and plates, which can be a bit confusing as everything else only fills a little bit. (e.g. assemblers will only get filled to enough stuff for 2 crafts and will stop requesting stuff if their output gets about 2 crafts worth of stuff, but smelters will frequently wind up with a full stack in the input. )

That is not correct. The inserters will feed in 2x the amount of ingredients required for the craft. IF there is a stack inserter feeding it, it may go up to the number of items in the hand of the inserter.

However, for all practical purposes, iron & copper smelters will only ever get 2 pieces of ore sitting in the input at any one time.

You may be confusing it with the output... Furnaces are the only machine structures to store a FULL STACK of output in the machine, (with normal operation). (Assemblers normally store only a handful of items, unless you force feed them manually.)

[war4peace]

Update: got some automation going. Works ok-ish but I am going to build a version 2.0 production line a bit further away to optimize some things.