One burner drill costs 70+ iron and mines slower than 1 iron per 26 (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) sec. This means that drill self-duplication period is more than 26*70 seconds ~ half an hour. And it doesn't need only iron to duplicate. Drill is stupidly slower than handmining (like x30) which means that in the early game you mine iron by hand even after you set up your drills, so the player's main role is mining iron, tons of it. And first electric mining is very far, so no real hope here.

This is already adressed in the forum thread. There should be some improvements soon, which makes early game significantly faster

Thank you for pointing that out Jodukus. I agree wholeheartedly that the initial release was far too slow, which is why I have just uploaded an update with several fixes to this and other problems. I guess we'll soon see how well I accelerated the early game.