Burner mining drill

The burner mining drill is the earliest mining machine in Factorio and operates without electricity by consuming fuel directly from its fuel inventory. It mines resources from the tile in front of it and outputs the mined product into the tile directly ahead, where it can be collected by hand, by transport belts, or by other logistics setups. Unlike electric mining drills, it is self-powered as long as it has fuel, which makes it especially useful in the early game and in setups where power is not yet available.

Its interface shows separate bars for the amount of fuel in the drill, the progress of mining, the depletion of a unit of fuel, and the product being mined. Because fuel is consumed over time as the drill works, keeping it supplied is essential for continuous operation. When placed on a coal patch, it can also be used to create simple autonomous fuel loops.

A common use is the self-sustaining coal mine. Two burner mining drills can be placed next to each other on a coal deposit and arranged so they face each other. In this configuration, each drill can mine coal and feed it to the other, allowing the coal to accumulate in both fuel inventories. This effectively creates a combined storage of 100 coal, with 50 coal in each drill. The same idea works with four drills or any other even number of drills arranged in pairs. It takes slightly less than three minutes for the drills to completely fill each other’s fuel inventories, after which they will sit idle until some of the stored coal is removed. If longer uptime is desired, the drills can output coal into a buffer chest instead of directly into another drill’s fuel stack.

A similar self-feeding layout can be built with transport belts and burner inserters, and it works with any number of burner mining drills on a coal patch. In this setup, a miner feeds coal onto a mirrored L-shaped belt arrangement, leaving a gap on the third belt segment. A burner inserter is placed in that gap so it can insert coal back into the miner. When making two of these setups opposite each other, it is important that no two burner inserters draw coal from the same belt piece, or one of them may run out of fuel. This makes the burner mining drill useful not only as an extractor, but also as the core of compact early coal-handling loops.