Craftomation 101 Automate Fire, Coal Bricks, and Bonfires

If the bonfire dies, the planet wins. Automating Fire is the first real systems problem in Craftomation 101: keep pits lit, keep heat expanding, and — in the same breath — produce Coal Bricks so CraftoMates can eat without stealing your attention every thirty seconds.

This guide assumes you already made Spark and Fire by hand and assembled at least one robot. If not, complete Getting Started first. Programming patterns live in Visual Programming; feeding depth is in Feed Robots. Recipe reference: Recipes and Early Recipes.

Why fire automation comes first

Fire is not only a tutorial beat. It unlocks:

• Sustained Bonfire heat that thaws tiles and reveals soil, paths, and later objectives
• Crafting gates such as Sand, Glass, Steel, Water, and almost every mid-game part that needs heat or flame
• The psychological contract of the game: if heat is manual forever, you never have bandwidth for programming depth

Coal Brick shares ingredients with the fire chain (Stone and Coal). Smart bases treat heat production and robot food as one logistics neighborhood, not two unrelated hobbies.

Automating fire in Craftomation 101

Recipes you will loop forever

Memorize these:

Output	Inputs
Spark	Stone + Stone
Fire	Spark + Coal
Coal Brick	Stone + Coal
Clay Brick	Soil + Stone
Bonfire	Clay Brick + Coal

Water (Ice + Fire) is the next sibling loop once ice is in range — needed for seeds, ales, tanks, and Steam Batteries — but do not derail heat for water on minute sixty.

Minimum viable Fire program

Assign one CraftoMate as Heat1. Keep the graph boring:

1. Find and pick Stone
2. Find and pick Stone
3. Combine → Spark
4. Find and pick Coal
5. Combine → Fire
6. Drop to the active Bonfire coordinate
7. Optional: Compare energy → if low, run EatBricks (or craft a brick and Eat)
8. Return to Idle

Verify Drop to highlights the pit. After you relocate bonfires, update coordinates or the robot will politely deliver Fire into empty ice.

Extract MakeFire as a function as soon as a second bot needs the same sequence (Visual Programming).

Couple Coal Bricks to the same yard

Coal Brick competes for Stone and Coal. Options:

Option A — Split specialists

• Heat1 only makes Fire for pits
• Brick1 only makes Coal Bricks into a marked stockpile

Clear ownership, easy debugging, slightly higher headcount.

Option B — One bot, two phases

Alternate: N Fire deliveries, then M brick crafts into storage. Use simple counters/repeats when unlocked, or hardcode a short sequence (Fire, Fire, Brick, Idle).

Option C — Shared stockpile + nurse

Brick1 floods a storage with Coal Bricks. Every worker’s energy branch Pick from that storage and Eat. Heat bots never craft food themselves.

Option C scales best once storages exist. Until then, Option A is enough.

Feeding behavior, ales, and eco/turbo are covered in Feed Robots.

Expanding bonfires without killing throughput

Hand-craft the second and third Bonfires (Clay Brick + Coal) while Heat1 maintains the first. Place new pits to:

• Unfreeze soil and resource belts you actually need
• Shorten walks between Stone, Coal, and the pit
• Open routes toward ice, iron, or the volcano corridor later

Do not spam ten pits on day one. Each pit is another Drop target and another failure mode. Two or three well-placed fires beat a cemetery of cold rings.

When Steam Bonfires (Heater + Tank) appear mid-game, treat them as upgrades to the same doctrine: automated flame/heat delivery, not a reason to delete your Fire function.

Layout tips that save batteries

• Craft near nodes, then carry products a short distance — not the reverse.
• Keep the Coal Brick stockpile between workers and the heat yard.
• If the seed put Coal far away, add a courier early or relocate the “factory floor” toward Coal.
• Pause and rewrite Drop coordinates after every major rebuild.

Procedural seeds change distances; they do not change recipes. Rebuild logistics, not chemistry.

Failure modes and fixes

Bonfire went dark while you edited code
Pause less, or keep a second heat bot. Remake Fire manually once, then fix why Drop/Find failed.

Robot holds Spark forever
Coal Find failed (depleted local node) or Combine never ran. Check hands and branch order.

Robot starves mid-route
Energy check missing or brick stockpile empty. See Feed Robots.

Too many bots fighting over Stone
Specialize and add Pick from storages instead of free-for-all Find and pick.

Heat expands but research stalls
You automated the wrong scarcity. Rebalance with Automation Priority.

From fire loop to planet loop

A stable Fire + Coal Brick neighborhood unlocks everything else: Steel lines, Water for organics, batteries for more CraftoMates, and eventually Steam Batteries for the volcano path in Terraforming. None of those matter if the first pit dies every time you open the editor.

Checklist before you walk away

1. At least one Bonfire stays lit for several full cycles unattended.
2. Coal Bricks accumulate faster than your crew eats them.
3. MakeFire (and ideally EatBricks) exist as functions.
4. Drop coordinates match current pit locations.
5. You know which bot owns heat vs bricks.
6. Recipes matches what your bots actually craft.

Automate fire early, keep the loop ugly but reliable, then invest creativity in the next bottleneck — not in rewriting Spark for the twelfth time.