BlockFactory:Mining

Mining with drills turns the ore fields on the surface of the world into a steady stream of raw materials. The fuel-driven Wooden Drill is available from the start; the electric Auto Drill comes with the first research. You can also mine fields by hand, see Gathering and Crafting.

Drills feeding belts on the steppe

Drills

	Wooden Drill	Auto Drill
Epoch	0	1
Unlocked by	Start	Steam Power
Size	2 × 2	3 × 3
Energy	Fuel, 150 kW	Electric, 90 kW
Mining speed	0.25 items/s	0.5 items/s
Output	in front of its left column	in front of its middle
Rune module slots	–	3
Noise	12 per minute	10 per minute
Recipe	3 Iron Gear + 3 Iron Plate + 1 Brick Furnace	3 Electronic Circuit + 5 Iron Gear + 10 Iron Plate

The mining speed is the rate of a drill that stands completely on ore with richness 1. For noise see Enemies, for module slots Rune Modules.

Placing a drill

• A drill mines what lies under its footprint. Place it on an ore field; the map shows the fields in their colors.
• The front of a drill faces you when you place it. It hands each item straight to the block in front of its output: onto a belt, into a chest or into a machine. A Wooden Drill placed directly in front of a Brick Furnace feeds it ore without a grabber.
• The Wooden Drill drops in front of its left column, as seen from the drill. Standing in front of it and facing it, that is the right half.
• The Auto Drill drops in front of its middle.
• On a belt, a drill puts items on the near lane.
• Nothing ever falls on the ground.

Output buffer

If nothing in front takes the item, it stays in the drill's output, and the drill keeps mining: the output collects up to 100 items (at most one stack) and the drill tries to hand them on every few ticks. Only when the output is full does the drill stop and show Output full. A drill on mixed ore also waits when the next ore is a different kind from what already lies in its output.

Fuel and power

The Wooden Drill burns fuel. Press Use to open its window with the fuel slot and the output, or crouch and press Use with fuel in your hand to fill it. With an empty hand, crouch and Use takes the whole output. A grabber can keep it fed. Fuel values are listed on Smelting.

The Auto Drill takes no fuel. It needs power from a nearby power pole, see Power. With too little power it mines more slowly.

How much a drill yields

The yield depends on the ore blocks under the drill: mining speed × the sum of the richness of all ore blocks ÷ the number of blocks in the footprint.

• Coverage: a drill that stands entirely on ore mines at full speed. A Wooden Drill with one of its four blocks on ore mines a quarter as fast. Blocks without ore count as zero.
• Richness: every field is richest in the middle and gets poorer towards the edge, down to half at the rim.
• Distance: the starting fields near the spawn have richness 1 in the middle. Fields farther out are bigger and richer, the more so the farther they lie from the spawn.
• World settings: server operators can make fields richer or poorer, see World Settings.
• Mixed ores: a drill on two kinds of ore mines them in turn, one item per ore block, so the output is mixed in the ratio of the blocks. Sort it with a Splitter filter (see Belts).

Ore fields

Ore fields never run out: a drill never exhausts its field. Drills mine these fields:

Field	Item	Where
Iron	Iron Ore	starting field and further out
Copper	Copper Ore	starting field and further out
Coal	Coal	starting field and further out
Stone	Stone	starting field and further out
Sand	Sand	starting field and further out
Clay	Clay	starting field and further out
Gold	Gold Ore	only far from the spawn
Uranium	Uranium Ore	only very far from the spawn

See The World for the map and the world layout.

Uranium needs Sulfuric Acid

Uranium Ore can only be mined by an Auto Drill supplied with Sulfuric Acid: 1 unit of acid per ore. The pipe connection for the acid sits in the middle of the drill's back, opposite the ore output, so one pipe can run along the back of a whole row of drills.

• Without acid, a drill on mixed ground skips the uranium and mines the other ores.
• On pure uranium it waits and shows No Sulfuric Acid.
• The Wooden Drill cannot mine uranium.

See Fluids, Oil Processing (where Sulfuric Acid is made) and Nuclear Power.

Oil

Oil does not come from drills. Oil fields hold single oil wells that an Oil Pumpjack pumps, see Oil Processing.

See also

• Smelting
• Belts
• The World
• Power
• Buildings