Chapter 3 ‐ Furnaces, mining drills, and chests

Previous page: "Chapter 2 - Resources and mining"

Burner devices

These devices are usually the first machines you use before you set up electricity. They operate by consuming burner fuels, which include wood, coal, and various processed fuels such as solid fuel. Due to energy content differences, coal lasts twice as long as wood and processed fuels last even longer. The burning of a partially consumed fuel is halted while a burner device is idle, hence no fuel is wasted unless the device is picked up. The burner devices that are important at the start of the game are stone furnaces, burner mining drills, burner inserters, and boilers. Other burner devices include vehicles. Some burner devices are covered in this chapter and others are covered in later chapters, when they become relevant.

Stone furnace

These 2 by 2 furnaces provide the first step for processing your metals, and they also serve as an intermediate ingredients for other devices. The furnaces require a fuel item (such as coal) and a smeltable resource item (such as iron ore) and after a few seconds the furnaces output a smelted resource item (such as iron plates). One furnace can hold up to one stack of each of the three mentioned item types. Inserters can be used to automatically add fuel and smeltable items. Inserters can also remove smelted items, but not anything else.

Burner mining drill

A burner mining drills is a 2 by 2 machine that consumes burner fuels and collects ores from ore patches. It can only be placed on ore patches and its collection area consists of the four tiles that it covers. The mining drill's output chute drops mined ores in front of it, and it can be rotated to have the chute face a new direction.

If there is nothing in front of the chute, the ore will fall on the floor and block the drill, but you can place a chest or a transport belt or a furnace in front of the drill chute to have it output there instead. The drill will keep mining ores one piece at a time until it runs out of energy, gets blocked by a full output, or depletes its collection area. If there are multiple types of ore patches within the drill's collection area, it will produce multiple ore types, which can cause problems unless the ores produced are separated using some sort of filtering.

Electric mining drill

An electric mining drill functions just like a burner mining drill except for the following differences: It has a 3 by 3 size with its output chute in the middle of its front face, and its collection area is 5 by 5, centered on the center of the drill itself. It is twice as fast as the burner mining drill and it pollutes slightly less. It requires electrical energy (see Chapter 7), but it uses notably less energy than the burner drill uses burner fuel energy. It works slower if it is partially powered and it has three slots for adding module devices when this feature is unlocked.

Chests

Chests are 1 by 1 crate-like entities that have no specific rotation. They provide the option to store items at a fixed location. Wooden chests have 16 storage slots, iron chests have 32 storage slots, and steel chests and their upgraded versions all have 48 storage slots. Like with the engineer's inventory, each slot in a chest can hold a partial or full stack of any item. Items can be added or removed from a chest either manually, or using any type of inserter that is next to the chest. In addition, mining drills can directly drop ores into chests located in front of their output chutes.

Chests cannot be moved until they are picked up and they can only be picked up when empty. If you attempt to pick up a chest with items, the items in it will be transferred to you inventory first, but if your inventory fills you'll be unable to pick it up. If a chest is destroyed, all the items inside are lost.

Chest inventories versus player inventories

Chest inventories and player inventories have some important differences:

• The player inventory always keeps itself sorted and puts all the empty spaces to the bottom. The chest inventory does not sort itself at all and you can mix the item stacks and empty spaces as you please.
• The player inventory has a row length of 10 and chest inventories have a row length of 8, which matches the capacity of every chest being a multiple of 8. While in vanilla Factorio chest inventory row length is 10, we made this adjustment for the Access mod so that moving up and down the rows will not sometimes skip over multiple rows at once due to the last row being incomplete. The resulting effect is that the chest GUI rows are different from the mod rows, but you still at least tell which item stacks are in the chest.
• Player inventories do not support locked slots but chests inventories do.

Locking chest slots (also called inventory bar or inventory restricting)

It is possible to restrict the inventory size of a chest by locking some or most of its slots, which is useful for preventing the overfilling of automatically filled chests. When a slot is locked, inserters or item transfer shortcuts will not be able to put any items into it. You can only manually put items into it using "LEFT CLICK" with the stack in hand. Meanwhile, items can be removed from locked slots as normal.

When the chest inventory is open, press "PAGE UP" or "PAGE DOWN" to increase or decrease the limit by 1. Hold "SHIFT" while pressing to increase or decrease by 5. Hold "CONTROL" while pressing to increase or decrease by 100 maximum amount. The locking of chest slot begins with the end of the last row and it moves backward until the first row.

The best use case for locked slots is the output chest of an assembling machine. If you want to produce exactly 3 stacks of the output item at most, then you take a wooden chest and adjust the locking until you have only 3 slots unlocked. The assembling machine will stop working when the 3 unlocked slots are all full.

Next page: "Chapter 4 - Inserters part 1 - Inserter logic and burner inserters"