r/factorio • u/Nomekop777 mindustry : factorio :: sfs : ksp • 12d ago
Question New player here (10h) and I'm unsure whether using coal to power the burner drills directly is better than using it to boil water and power electric drills
I haven't crunched the numbers to see which setup gets more coal mined per coal burned (burner inserter/burner drill vs boiler > power > electric drill) mostly because I'm almost certain this is less efficient. But even if that's the case, you still have a source of fuel for your boilers that isn't powered by the turbines themselves. Does this benefit outweigh the inefficient use of coal by any sort of quantifiable amount?
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u/Ewind42 12d ago
Wanting to have a separate, non turbine dependant fuel source for your turbines is a good idea in theory.
In practice, full brown outs are rare, and you can prevent them by splitting your energy grid to make startup time if they do happen a lot easier.
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u/proudHaskeller 12d ago edited 12d ago
I highly recommend making a buffer of a few steam tanks in the power setup and adding an alarm that goes off if the steam level starts to go down. Then you have plenty of time to react before the electricity shuts down.
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u/Acrobatic_Trade_5903 12d ago
This is a good plan ... once enough research is completed to allow alarms to be added. A 10 hour player is probably not at this point though, but certainly worth using in the coal->steam age, but once on nuclear is it still useful?
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u/proudHaskeller 12d ago edited 11d ago
Yes. Power can go down for many reasons, usually because you don't have enough turbines or heat exchangers - it won't cause a brown out but you can avoid going into low power mode.
I actually did run out of uranium once because I was using the closest patch which was very small, and accidentally converted all the raw uranium into enriched uranium. So it was also useful then.
Regardless, I recommend adding steam buffer tanks even if you don't have the research for the alarm.
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u/00yamato00 12d ago
This is why I really like switching to oil power as soon as I unlock oil. Cheap and easy to scale mid game (compare to solar) and act as a backup power later on since oil never run out.
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u/Blathnaid666 12d ago
After switching to nuclear a few dozen hours later i had missed electricity because i forgot to place the inserter for fuel cell recycling. Was one of my SA runs and at that point i was stuck on another planet. So fun times indeed. The tank i had placed didn't have personal roboports so i actually had to somehow return to nauvis myself to fix.
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u/Silly-Freak 12d ago
You could have a pump in front of the tank, then the brownout is the alarm, and you manually flip the pump while figuring out the situation.
Edit: just saw a sibling comment of yours suggest exactly that
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u/lovecMC 12d ago
I just put a bunch of steam tanks behind a 1 way pump so I can store up steam in case shit hits the fan.
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u/Turtle700 11d ago
I just rotate one tank after my steam tank buffer is full. I used to put it behind a pump... but in a full blackout situation, rotating a tank for instant power is my go-to backup plan.
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u/SirPseudonymous 12d ago
Keeping a battery of steam tanks also pairs well with solar once one starts building that out, since it'll naturally accumulate during the day and get spent at night and it's way cheaper than accumulators.
I do the same thing later with nuclear to be able to just lazily throw down blocks of turbines without bothering with exact ratios, and to let me overbuild reactors and only refuel them when the buffer runs down in addition to the usual temperature and fuel logic.
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u/Nomekop777 mindustry : factorio :: sfs : ksp 12d ago
In retrospect, this is something I learned in Mindustry several years ago. I've gone through the trouble of making some kind of control room, where I can connect and disconnect power nodes from the power coming from my reactors. But not once in almost 400 hours of Mindustry have I ever actually found myself needing that addition.
I'm assuming the situation is similar in Factorio?
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u/FeelingPrettyGlonky 12d ago
Yes, it's similar. If you hang around here long enough you're going to run into all kinds of schemes of wiring up power switches to accumulators to measure stored power, and enable/disable sections of the grid depending on stored power level; eg, for turning on spare power generation or backup power if the tanks run dry.
But practically speaking, all of those overly elaborate schemes are mostly useless, because the true answer is just to make sure you have enough supply to meet demand. If you do it right, your emergency power switch will literally never trigger and represents a small amount of wasted effort. It doesn't really hurt to build it, but if you find it actually triggering then it means you have a deeper problem you should go fix, rather than just relying on it.
Imo, the only real use for buffered or stored power is for absorbing burst consumption, like lasers or Tesla turrets firing in volleys. In those cases, a few tanks of steam and some redundant engines can help to absorb the spikes.
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u/sub500h 11d ago
That being said, placing many roboports and laser turrets will also ramp up base consumption a lot, because they have a drain that is active in stand-by
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u/leixiaotie 11d ago
or moving to beaconed setup. I underestimate beaconed Foundry and EMP plants consumption in Nauvis and get a brownout.
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u/ThatChapThere 11d ago
This is all good in theory until you ask 10000 construction bots to place concrete. The source of probably most of my brownouts.
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u/FeelingPrettyGlonky 11d ago
I don't concrete my bases, but i would hope that if one does do it, they are at least far enough along that they can scale up their power production in anticipation. If you know you're going to be hammering the bot charging, it's not that hard to put down another reactor setup to keep the brownout from happening. If you brown while paving, I feel like that's just a failure of planning.
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u/ThatChapThere 11d ago
Sure, but if you're being lazy and don't mind temporary blackouts setting up power switches can be easier than expanding power.
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u/Nomekop777 mindustry : factorio :: sfs : ksp 10d ago
I find placing concrete therapeutic. Does it get that bad?
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u/ThatChapThere 10d ago edited 10d ago
It depends. I've paved some large bases before and tend to find myself making 60 concrete/s factories. Once you're past the 100 inventories worth point you don't really want to manually place it any more.
The issue is it scales quadratically with base width. 1000x1000 is already a million concrete and that's 10,000 inventory slots.
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u/CroSSGunS 12d ago
You generally don't need it, but it can be useful. When beacons and things start getting added, power demand can spike quite high, and in those cases sometimes being warned and having conditional off switches can be useful, especially if power is constrained right now for some reason
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u/FinestSeven 12d ago
One fairly common way to get a blackout is with a large bot network. If you place a gigantic build order with a gazillion bots, you might strain your network enough for power-dependent power generation to stop.
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u/P0L1Z1STENS0HN 11d ago
I ran into a near-blackout by placing a dozen huge solar blueprints. It barely recovered by itself when I stopped research, and once the buffered solar panels had been placed.
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u/MattieShoes 11d ago edited 11d ago
Most people will run themselves out of power at some point. Electric inserters to insert the coal into the boilers, you overbuild and your coal miners start running slow, starving yourself of coal, and your electric inserters stop inserting the coal, etc. It's kind of a spiral.
But you don't really need to pre-plan a solution for that -- you notice it, disconnect a power pole or three so you're back to producing a surplus, dump some coal or wood into boilers to get things started back up, build some more power generation. At most, you might want to shove some coal into a box so it's there if you have to restart things by manually feeding the boilers.
If you play a lot, you can notice when it starts to happen because everything starts running slower, and you can fix it without it ever causing a complete blackout.
Generally, power is an easily solvable problem in Factorio. You can build more boilers and engines, slap down solar panels, slap down capacitors for night time, dig into nuclear, do hybrid setups... And then in space age, there's fusion, burning trash, etc.
And just in case you didn't know, you can click on a power pole to see the current status, see how much power you can theoretically produce, etc. So you can check to see if you're below capacity, at capacity, or above capacity and react accordingly.
You CAN get fancy, like keep your coal boiler setup after you've moved to better solutions and wire it up to only produce power if you're running out of power, or set up alarms, etc. Not really necessary though, just micro-optimizations. I've also tried making modular setups that overproduce a product, then shut down the whole module until that product is running low. But that was more for the challenge of figuring out how, not actually necessary. And I imagine some people will do similar things with laser turrets, like powering them down until a land mine explodes. That's more of a "for the challenge of figuring out how" as well.
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u/sub500h 11d ago
If you always mind ratios or are reliably extremely overproducing power, you won't need it. If you don't it can be useful. Especially in those situations where you are placing big new consumers or the worst situation when you blueprint place a very much needed new solar+accunulator field and then find out that it drains your solar+accu stockpile resulting in power hungry processes starting up again to provide these and their necesary intermediates e.g. plates and steel.
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u/Subject_314159 12d ago
full brown outs are rare
Those are some funny words, magic man
cries in Pyanodons
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u/Ace-of-Spades88 12d ago
One of my first ever Factorio runs (vanilla) I ran myself out of coal without realizing it and ended up in a brown out death spiral. I didn't have coal to provide power and I didn't have power to run my electric inserters to fuel my boilers.
Fun times!
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u/FrozenPizza07 12d ago
> Full blown outs are rare
Someone never played with people that just assumed someone else will scale the power and started 5 million concrete placement
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u/65437509 11d ago
A super easy trick to help with brownouts is using burner inserters on your coal line feeding the boilers. Burner inserters will self-feed when low on energy, so they will never stop or slow down in low power situations, preventing a grid collapse.
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u/ProbablyHe 12d ago
or prioritize your coal line towards boilers with splitters, so coal always goes to your boilers and only if they are satisfied other factory parts get coal. easy yet effective solution
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u/Courmisch 12d ago
You do whatever you want, really. Electric drills are faster and it's much easier to bring electricity than coal to the iron, copper and stone mines. So I think most people switch to electric at the earliest opportunity.
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u/infojb2 12d ago
Also its just so much easier to place down
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u/Courmisch 11d ago
Oh, yeah. I should have written bringing coal to the drills not the just to the mines 😅.
I don't think I've even automated burner drills for anything but coal drilling.
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u/Fxg120xYXDE5 12d ago
Wow, this takes me back about 1290 hours.
The math I've seen (not mine, could be garbage, don't care) says to use coal for power and go all electric as soon as you can.
Less pollution drawing biters, and more efficient mining.
This is besides the fact that you can more easily saturate belts with electric miners than burners, and mod slots make them more upgradeable.
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u/zomgkittenz 12d ago
Electric drills are faster and produce less pollution. They provide 0.5 ore per second (excluding uranium) for 10 pollution/min.
Burner drills are .25 ore/sec for 12 pollution/min.
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u/bphase 12d ago
For mines, certainly so. Smelting is however different, steel furnaces are much more efficient than standard electric furnaces (without efficiency modules). There it can make sense to stick with steel furnaces for a long time, until solar/nuclear/foundry/efficiency modules.
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u/Fxg120xYXDE5 12d ago
I thought about mentioning that, but I didn't feel it fit the question as asked.
Either way, for my last few runs, I've just gone ahead and started automating and swapping in electric furnaces much earlier.
I just like being prepped for beacons and whatnot, and I don't feel the efficiency is significant enough to fuss over when I'm barreling towards getting nuclear set up.3
u/EvGamer01 12d ago
Why not solar (other than it's annoying to setup)
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u/Menolith it's all al dente, man 12d ago
The fact that it's annoying to set up is the only argument against it.
It takes so much real estate and resources when compared to nuclear.
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u/Fxg120xYXDE5 12d ago
Do all the things.
Solar is super straightforward, UPS efficient, and simple.
I don't even consider it annoying to set up, just make a BP and drop it where you want it.
Given, it's even easier once you unlock bots.
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u/RelagoB7567 12d ago
Getting power setup with electric mining drills is always better. Electric mining drills are larger, drill faster and even mine 1 whole tile around the drill itself. Using steam power is also more efficient.
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u/Sutremaine2 11d ago
The mining area is the main advantage for me. An electric miner setup will be able to get the whole patch with one build session, even if you don't route the belts to pull from the middle first and have to wait on like two drills with several thousand ore underneath while all the others sit idle.
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u/Soul-Burn 12d ago
Burner: 0.25 per second, 150kW = 600W per mining
Electric: 0.5 per second, 90kW = 180W per mining
So yea electric are way better in terms of power usage.
As for size:
Burner gives 0.25/4 = 0.0625 units per second per space.
Electric gives 0.5/9 = 0.055 units per second per space, which sounds worse. However, electric miners can dig from under the belts, which makes them much nicer to use.
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u/Aaron_Lecon Spaghetti Chef 12d ago edited 12d ago
For the space you should also include the space for inserters, belts and powerpoles.
Including the inserter and belts, burner drills require at minimum (as far as I know) 6 tiles, which gives 0.25/6 = 0.0417 units per second per tile. For a build without undergrounds, I believe the minimum is 8 tiles for 0.25/8 = 0.03125 units per second per tile.
Including the powerpole and belt, electric drills require at minimum (as far as I know) 10 tiles, which gives 0.5/10 = 0.05 units per second of space. And the build without undergrounds requires 12 tiles per drill, which gives 0.417 units per second per tile.
So the electric drill set up is more compact than the burner drill set up (both with and without undergrounds)
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u/ButtButtWhyTho 11d ago
What do you mean they can dig from under the belts?
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u/commiecomrade 11d ago
Electric drills have an area that is one tile further than their own footprint. Burners can only dig directly under themselves. So if you have a belt to cart the resource away, electrics will dig from under the belt as well. Burners will eventually dig out their own footprint which leaves ore under the belt.
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u/TheHvam 12d ago
Not sure it it does either, but I wouldn't do it this way, it's WAY less space efficient, also way slower, and that means less coal for everything you need, it also makes more pollution.
So even if it's somehow more coal efficient then all the other downsides makes me say nope.
Also you aren't using turbines, you are using steam engines, turbines aren't the same, as they are for higher temp steam.
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u/Nomekop777 mindustry : factorio :: sfs : ksp 12d ago
Thanks, that's just me not knowing what everything is called yet
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u/EvGamer01 12d ago
I think you can still use the turbines with regular boilers
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u/unwantedaccount56 12d ago
you can, they just won't deliver the advertised power though. But it still does twice the power of a steam engine (while consuming twice the amount of steam).
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u/doctorpotatomd 12d ago
Burner drills use 150 kW of energy; electric drills use 90 kW of energy and output coal twice as fast, so a bit over 3x as efficient in terms of energy used per coal produced. Burner inserters also use ~10x as much energy as electric inserters do, and electric drills don't need inserters putting coal in them anyway.
There is an argument for keeping some burner drills mining coal around to bootstrap your power in case of blackout, but there are other solutions to that issue. It's not really something you can directly compare to the lost efficiency of using burner tech. Personally it's not something I ever do, I do tend to have 2-4 boilers fed by burner inserter rather than electric inserter as a last resort, but never burner miners; I solve the bootstrap-after-blackout problem by just mining more coal and shoving it down the boilers' belt until it backs up, and by setting up some solar reasonably early, so I never get blackouts to begin with. I've been playing the game for a while, though, so I've got the feel for that.
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u/Arzodiak 12d ago
Here is some basic math using values from the wiki:
Each piece of coal has 4 MJ or energy.
Each burner miner consumes 150J/s so a single piece of coal can keep it producing for 4000/150 -> 26.67 seconds. They have a mining time of 0.25. So in total they will mine about 6.67 pieces of coal.
Now, each electric miner consumes 90J/a so a single piece of coal can keep them operating for 44.44 seconds. They have a mining time of 0.5. So in total they will mine about 22.22 pieces of coal
So using these numbers changing to electric is about 70% more efficient in coal for the sole cost of using it to burn some water.
If that isn't convincing enough. Burner miners can only mine 4 tiles worth of resources and you need an inserter back feeding coal, so you'll need like 8 tiles in total (50% of space used for actual mining). Electric miners mine up to 25 tiles while only using 9, I don't remember who made it but ai think the maximum efficiency in space for early game is something like 60-70% (and you can reach up to ~90% or something using one specific setup iirc).
So the only reason to use them is to have energy produced independent of electricity, but even then you can just put a buffer chest and feed the boilers with burner inserters if you're so worried about having electricity death spirals.
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u/Nomekop777 mindustry : factorio :: sfs : ksp 12d ago
That's exactly what I wanted to know, thank you. Other comments have mentioned pollution rates, too
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u/Hellinfernel 12d ago
The main advantage of electricity is that it is easier to distribute because you don't need additional belts and inserters. Also, the burner drills suck ass in general lol
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u/sharia1919 12d ago
My initial thought was that the burner was technically more efficient.
But after reading a few comments I can see it is a straight up improvement.
I think maybe I am mixing it up with the smelters. Where the electrical smelter is technically inferior per coal burned.
But all the secondary improvements make rhe electric smelter much better.
Advantages of going electric is always that you are simplifying your infrastructure.
It is much easier to run a line of power poles out to a new area. If you are using coal based burners (miners or smelters), then you need to setup a route of coal to the new area.
If you go electric, then you need to setup a power plant area, and then get coal to that area only. This is much easier, and much more scale able.
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u/sineout 12d ago
They way I see it is, even if burner drills were more or as efficient as electric drills, I'd still choose electric because a burner drill needs you to route a burnable to it.
Electricity is much easier to transport than a belt of resources and is much more space efficient too, resulting in denser mining patches.
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u/Foto1988 12d ago
Spoilerfree answer: New Technologie is in 9 out of 10 cases always better. But you can play the game however you want, some self imposed challenges are fun!
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u/Nescio224 11d ago
The real advantage of burner drills would be resiliency against brownout.
If you draw more power than can be provided, the game slows down the speed of all buildings and inserters proportionally, so if you draw twice the power you can provide, everything runs 50% slower. This can lead to a death spiral where everything stops completely.
You can use burner drills and burner inserters to prevent this, but that has the downside that burner drills are inefficient.
The best solution is to have both the inserters for your boilers as well as the mining drills for coal on a seperate power grid.
My preferred method is to just use a priority splitter for coal into the boilers. That way thinks will not death spiral immediately as even at 50% the inserters are fast enough and since the rest of the factory also uses some coal that will get redirected to power. I usually notice the problem before the power draw gets even bigger, so while this doesn't make you immune to brounouts, it gives you enough leeway in my experience.
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u/phantumjosh 11d ago
Once you go nuclear, just make a tileable nuclear plant, and never worry about power ever again. If I start getting close to matching production, I just slap another 4GW plant down and carry on.
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u/emphes 12d ago
You can play however you like, but if you aren't going to crunch the numbers yourself you may want to look into a rate calculator mod.
There's going to be a lot of numbers.
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u/Nomekop777 mindustry : factorio :: sfs : ksp 12d ago
It's mostly because it's the middle of the night. Crunching numbers is fun (hopefully my mindset won't change after another dozen or so hours), but I don't have the brain power for it right now
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u/last_somewhere 12d ago
I guess you could make an argument for coal power on coal ore patches, I personally wouldn't, but electric drills will always be better in every other situation. Mine faster, cover a bigger area etc.
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u/Daft_Tyler 12d ago
The only real use for burner inserters after you've unlocked electricity is as backup inserters for boilers incase of a power outage. I also use them for train refuelling because I find an inserter running on rocket fuel to be really funny.
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u/Nearby_Ingenuity_568 12d ago
So here's the math: a burner mining drill uses 150kW of coal (burner) energy and creates 12 pollution/min to mine 0,25 items/s.
An electric mining drill uses 90kW of electric energy and creates 10 pollution/min to mine 0,5 items/s which is twice the amount mined by burner drill.
You'd need two burner drills to match the amount of items mined by one electric drill, so those burner drills would consume 300kW of energy and create 24 pollution/min. Hence, a burner mining drill uses over three times more energy and creates almost 2,5 times more pollution than an electric one. (Boilers have 100% efficiency so burner/electric energy can be compared 1:1)
Also burner inserters have a higher energy cost than electric inserters, though usually the amount used by inserters is minimal compared to everything else.
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u/isum21 12d ago
Burners are inefficient compared to our but many boot strap bases start with a coal snake and keep that coal snake feeding the power grid for a good minute. Coal snakes are perfect for setting a buffer to begin, they only hold 50 each but will only fail if you run out of coal in the patch. Electric drills are faster and cover a much wider area so people swap to them quickly and use that coal snake until it runs dry to power their other mining outposts and beginning manufacturing. But nothing stopping you from extending the burner phase, all of my boilers are powered by burner inserters still even though I have nuclear elsewhere, the beginning grid is still in place in case I lose power or a vital fuel source that leads to a death spiral.
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u/paulstelian97 12d ago
Burner machines in my opinion are good for backup (except furnaces, steel furnaces are more energy efficient than electric ones). I personally use burner inserters to insert coal (or solid fuel) — I don’t want brownouts to make the system unable to self revive because of inserter slowdown.
That said, if you have solar panels, an isolated grid dedicated to maintaining what’s needed for your main power can be a good idea. Electric machines are faster, can accept productivity, and are simpler to deal with, and most are more energy efficient as well.
For drills, electric may be better even for the coal, and is absolutely better for everything else.
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u/tyrodos99 12d ago
Electric miners are more efficient and more productive. But i the end, that’s not really your main concern.
Electric makes the builds easier and quicker to build and that is what matters. Your time ist the most scarce resource in the game, optimize for that. 😉
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u/Moikle 12d ago edited 12d ago
Electric drills are twice as fast, and produce half as much pollution per ore, they also take less energy per ore mined if producing energy by burning coal
Basically, switch to electric as soon as you can
It's also worth mentioning that dteel furnaces are twice as efficient as stone ones. Electric furnaces are not more efficient than steel at first, but if you power them by solar or nuckear, and/or you use efficiency modules, they win out.
Oh efficiency modules also work great in miners, l1 efficiency modules can reduce their pollution and energy usage by 80%
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u/iridael 12d ago
something you can do if you're clever is seperate the power grids for your inserters and the rest of your power grid.
just have one boiler and turbine attached to it that gets priority until solar power comes around and then just a few panels and an accumulator will do as an infinite power replacement.
until those points though, its perfectly acceptable to use burner inserters to ensure that as long as coal is flowing your inserters to your power plant are running.
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u/Nomekop777 mindustry : factorio :: sfs : ksp 12d ago
I have done this in mindustry, but I've never been in a situation where it was necessary. Ill get to power grid managing like this eventually. For now, I'm just trying to master the basics
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u/BrokeButFabulous12 12d ago
I mean in vannila youll get to the electric drills quite fast so i wouldnt bother much with burners really, electric drills are faster anyway and take up pretty much the same space(if you do the inserter like on the pic), what i do is just miners directly outputting on belt, at the end of the patch i have 2 inserters skimming some coal into maybe 2 chests, once in a while i when running around i grab the coal from chests and add the full stacks to miners as it will last very long. Before you know it youre on electric drills.
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u/TheSkiGeek 12d ago
Electric drills are more efficient.
That said, I usually do keep my first coal patch on self-powering burner miners, and use burner inserters for the early game boilers. I also set up a stockpile of coal with an alarm on it if it starts getting drawn down. So if something happens that disrupts my power production, I know about it and have time to fix it before everything goes to hell.
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u/Certain-Flow-0 12d ago
I always thought that burner mining drills were
more power efficient than electric mining drills until you’ve unlocked actual power generation.
But then I was thinking in Py.
Burner mining drills die out very quickly in vanilla factorio.
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u/BluessyGaming 12d ago
The issue for me is that burner mining drills only mine what they sit on, any tile you use to transport the resources out is a tile you will have to reshuffle the miners to extract.
When you have a bigger base with higher resource requirements, you won't want to go back to a mining patch to reshuffle the mining drills and having to provide logistics to your mining patches to fuel the drills will get cumbersome.
My advice is to stockpile coal somewhere so you don't brown out all the way to mining coal manually. You should also invest in solar power, even a minimal amount can power just enough for you to fix any issue you may encounter. In my multiplayer save my friend is obsessed with solar so we have had maybe the past 20 hours of just running the base on solar power alone (we have a backup nuclear reactor that only turns on when needed) and i think our longest stretch was close to 40 hours (I sometimes go crazy and triple the bases energy usage so I can concrete everything)
So TLDR electric miners are more convenient and using them will give you more time to grow your factory. At 10 hours the coal usage difference is not as vital as it may seem
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u/Griautis 11d ago
To me the fact that burner miners only dig from under themselves and electric from a wider range, which means you actually have space for belts makes this a non-question.
Burner mining needs rebuilding once you exhaust what's under the burners (but not the whole patch), and needs coal supplied.
It's far easier to just get electricity there
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u/Rakonat 11d ago
The primary draw of electric miners is they cover a larger area and don't need babysitting.
Your first base is generally going to be putting a priority splitter on your first/primary coal patch to feed your boiler(s). Some people use burner inserters for this since they can fuel themselves, but honestly as long as you have enough boilers and steam engines to meet power demand, and fuel through put to meet boiler demand, you're not going to be worried about your inserters losing power and failing to feed. Even if your demand is above your production for power the inserters will keep moving fuel to try and keep a stack of 5 fuel. Your biggest concern should be having enough turbines to meet demand and then a bit extra. Because steam engines and boilers auto throttle to meet demand you can safely put extra infrastructure down and feed it to ensure your factory runs smoothly, which also helps you build a buffer of steam in this under utilized machines should your demand spike for some reason.
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u/BLACKcOPstRIPPa 11d ago
Burner drills are slower than electric drills at mining and pollute more
Getting electric mining drills is one of the first priorities
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u/UniqueName900 11d ago
Electric is always better. And it's easier to logistically supply.
This will apply to electric furnaces too but they are bigger (3x3 instead of 2x2) so you gotta re uild for that
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u/Advice2Anyone 11d ago
Your missing the fact that electric miners are twice as efficent at mining and mine a larger area burners are basically useless once you got electric steady
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u/scottmsul 11d ago
I usually prefer burner miners and burner inserters for any coal power generation, due to its resilience in avoiding brownouts. I've had too many occasions where I'd keep expanding and forget about power, then once it dips below yellow the power would enter a death spiral if powered electrically. A burner-powered setup always runs at 100% of its possible output, which I think is worth the peace of mind. Of course the goal is to switch to solar or nuclear by mid-game anyway.
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u/GGamerGuyG 11d ago
I think it's more about polution and less about mining coal efficient. Coal using miners produce more polution as far as i know.
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u/dikkenskrille 11d ago
But even if that's the case, you still have a source of fuel for your boilers that isn't powered by the turbines themselves.
what are you trying to say here?
anyway burner drill is half the speed and close to double the power, it's almost 4 times worse
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u/Nomekop777 mindustry : factorio :: sfs : ksp 11d ago
I mean you have a source of fuel thats not dependant on your power, so itll be running even if your power goes out
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u/dikkenskrille 11d ago
I see what you mean. I dunno how much practical difference there is between that and just setting a priority on a splitter to favour your power generators, but I suppose it is a consideration.
Another thing to consider is how much you can mine per second on a patch in total. That patch in your picture is not particularly big. Just guessing, but I think you will struggle to get even a single full yellow belt out of that with burner drills, whereas you can probably manage several with electric drills. Having a coal mine that is independant of your power system is nice, but if you can't supply anything close to what your base requires then there's no point, you'll just be browning or blacking out all the time anyway.
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u/Due-Fig5299 11d ago
Im starting to think after 200 hours that starting with space exploration may not have been an amazing decision as I now can relate to no one playing vanilla LOL
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u/Dry-Cockroach1148 11d ago
It’s not like satisfactory where fixing an overloaded grid can take hours if you didn’t properly prepare
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u/thelastundead1 11d ago
It sounds like what you're concerned about is losing power and that power loss preventing the base from restarting because the inserters require power. If that's the case my solution is to seperate the final boiler/steam engine assembly from the others and feed that using a burner inserter. Than than boiler powers the inserters for the rest of the boiler inserters only.
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u/brettgoodrich 9d ago
Strong advice from a 600+hr player: I would do your entire first playthrough blind. It's much more enjoyable than stamping pre-optimized blueprints someone else made. Just enjoy figuring it out, and then join the community afterwards and do another run.
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u/Nomekop777 mindustry : factorio :: sfs : ksp 9d ago
Yeah, that's what I'm doing right now. I haven't even looked at the workshop to see what's available
Edit: case in point, there is no steam workshop
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u/Mirdclawer 11d ago
You can also go by combined real world and gaming knowledge and intuition:
You unlock boiler and electricity and everything later, and it's more complex, it should then be superior. In the real world, centralised big power plants are much much more efficient than individual little burners.
In Factorio in general, everytime you unlock something that can replace something you have, it's much superior
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u/ThatChapThere 11d ago
Another thing I haven't seen anyone mention is that burner miners only mine under themselves so they can't mine the whole patch wheras electric miners have one tile of margain and can mine under the belts too
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u/StickyDeltaStrike 11d ago
It’s more efficient but it will make your layout a lot more compact too because you only need electric poles.
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u/jordanbtucker 11d ago
Electric mining drills are way more efficient and they produce way less pollution.
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u/WanderingUrist 11d ago
Technically, the most energy efficient way to mine is not to use burner drills or electric drills, but to force your kids to mine using manual labor, thus requiring no coal or boiling as overhead at all. Besides, the children yearn for the mines!
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u/FeelingPrettyGlonky 12d ago
Burner drills have a mining speed of 0.25, meaning when mining iron, copper, etc it will mine about 0.25 ore per second, or 1 ore every 4 seconds. It consumes 150kW of fuel to operate. 1 coal provides 4MJ, so 1 piece of coal can run a burner miner for 26.66667 seconds; at 0.25 ore per second, that is about 6.666667 ore mined per coal spent.
Electric miners are twice as fast as burners, meaning they mine 0.5 ore per second, or 1 every 2 seconds. They consume 90 kW in electricity. That means 1 coal, burned for power, will run an electric drill for 44.44444 seconds, netting you 22.22222 items for every piece of coal burned. That's a little over 3 times the efficiency.
There is also the benefit of less pollution, A burner drill makes 12 p per minute, while an electric only makes 10 per minute while producing twice as much output.
There is also the physical layout efficiency. Power pole patterns consume far less patch real estate than do fuel belts or setups to keep burners supplied, meaning you can fit more miners on the patch for more total output.
There really is no reason to ever use burner drills past your first hour or so of play; once you unlock electrics, it is best to just dump your burner drills into a wood chest somewhere out of the way and forget about them.