The most effective planet mining, automated if possible.

Hello there.

I'd like to find some inspiration, or brainstorming about efficient planetary miners. Iam playing survival (almost only) with 3x inventory and with scarse sersouces mod ( https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1360027924 ), which makes some limits in design my buildings. The limitation is absence of uranium, platinum and gold on the planet or in its vicinity, asteroids contains only iron and silver. Uranium only on Alien planet, platinum on Mars. and nearest gold is on the Moon.

I started on Earth with lander and fortunately (and unfortunately) I have landed in the mountains. Fotrtunately, because of all Ice around to extract hydrogen, but unfortunately hard to move around with wheeled vehicle. Because of no Uranium (ok, source of small ammount maybe Unknown signal probes) I have to use solar charged batteries and/or hydrogen. Neither option allows long hovering in the air.

Do anyone has some idea or working design? In previous games along with this current one I have tried almost any possible option:

Hand drilling - Everyone does, very time consuming
Hand drilling with small container vehicle to empty personal directory - Less time, but lot of walking
(Hand drilling can be without overhead, if you pick no stone, bud with 3x or 1x inventory is really annoying)

Wheeled vehicle drilling with fixed drills - Useful only with ice and very shallow veins, hard to manuvering underground
Wheeled vehicle drilling with vertical (retractable) drill system - Rather useful, but not as much in the mountains. Power evective. But must be really huge and full of heavy or might be hard to control, especially at steep slopes.
(Wheeled vehicles cant by automated and hard to use on steepe slopes)

Flying small driller with fixed drills - Can be very effective, it can easily manuever underground. Harder to design for both vertical (to the vein) and horizontal (mine the ore) drilling together. But without reactor, using only battery or hydrogen, it has very limited action radius (with heavy load)
Flying medium driller - Iam using now (screenshot), I found it most usefull, but if you need to drain whole vain, you have to jumping from spot to spot.
Flying heavy driller - Yes, the thing on screenshot can fly and can mine even before physics update. But it is very energy conpsuming (stabilising thrusters) and need to be directly connected with the base. Because we do not have hoses, its operation radius is way limited. But can mine whole vein in once.
(whole time flying drillers have limited time to hover, drillers which can be temorary landed consume a lot of fuel/energy delivering big ammount of mined ore)

Fixed small mining station - can be equiped with MArmOS arm for better effectivity (moving parts can't be blueprinted), but it has limited use in gravity environment. In most cases, can mine only small part of the vein, and is hardly move. For the static one on the screenshot, you have to have another device to dig hole for access the vein, but it is material effective.
Fixed huge mining station - The only one I have never made. Very material consuming, with a huge time to build and remove it once vein is mined. I think it is as same as inefective hand drilling.
(big problem with stationary drilling station is their stationarity. If you need to move to other vein, you have to grind it and build again. You must also make transport to moving ore to the base).

What is your preffered way to mine? What should I use on the planet under those conditions? Is thare a way for autonomous mining on planet?







Thanks,

JR.

 

For planet mining, I use a large-block vertical miner, usually with 9 drills on a 3x3 frame with enough vertical clearance to allow it to go down four-to-five blocks, complete with a couple sorters (one for ore, the other as a stone dump), three or four small reactors, a single gyroscope, a stack of small cargo containers, and usually four large atmospheric thrusters for lift and a bunch of small atmospheric thrusters for movement and control. I use warheads to open up a vein (nothing like strip-mining to ruin the aesthetics of a world!) and get to work sucking the vein dry. I’m an inorganic vampire.

 

Now I play with static mining station and small drone to take back ore to base.
But this is for fun...

The other way is to build a flying mining ship (only vertical mining).

Can be expansive, but once you have one it's ok, you can mine a lot very easly...

 

Nukes.
Find a Patch, blow an 19 block diameter hemisphere down into it, youll see "slices" or ores along the newly created smooth walls.
then just an easy to fly horizontal flying drill ship, or single central pole spinning extenda-drill placed to dig into those particular slices of yummy.

Thats the "most effective" for me. that fastest- in time of start to gigatons in box, The cheapest in actual material needed (Just a few pistons, a rotor, and a lotta conveyor tubes), and the most accomplish-able both by yourself, and in survival mode

 

it's also rather fun.
I remember just creating a bunch of them around the outside of my base preventing wolfs for getting in.
I'd set the time for 15 seconds...start walking......keep counting then realize i should probably be running. ka-boom

 

It's not automated, but I once made this little mining vehicle.

Fully built in survival and uses MArmOS to control two extendable mining arms. This made it very flexible and easy to use.

The only thing is it needed some mine-shaft when I made it. Though, it was before the wheels update. So it may not need it anymore.
Anyway, even though the mine-shaft can take some time to build, it still end up with a pretty epic network of tunnels.

 

This looks very interesting. And seems to be usefull. Thanks

 

Has anyone actually made a working drone script? I know that people have made magnetic grinder torpedos, so couldn't you modify that script for mining?

 

As a point of interest, I designed “Boss Hogg” to do the same thing as the vertical miner I described, but with a lot more stability. The downside with the vertical miner was its lateral stability and tendency to roll and/or pitch; and, often times, once it started rolling and/or pitching, it would often be impossible to restore its vertical orientation and it would end up on the ground like a beached whale. I don’t have that problem with Boss Hogg.

 

It has been a while since I have played but if I were to start a new game I would consider creating mining and refining stations. Refined ore is far lighter/easier to transport and you can make a simple drill station that's fairly cheap. A cargo container, some pistons, a rotor, and a refinery are all you need. Plus solar and maybe a battery in your case as well.

You don't really need to refine the ore on the spot but as someone who usually plays without uranium I know that power is very valuable so saving some is always nice.


There is something else I noticed. You've used all large grid which is good for hydrogen but terrible for drills. I would swap out those large grid drills for small grid ones and remove the conveyors in the middle and replace them with five more large grid hydrogen tanks.

Edit--'---
Oh, and if you're using a large grid battery get rid of that too. Small grid battery is where it's at. Same with any ejectors/sorters. Move that down to your small grid drills, it's much lighter.

 

I am in the process of building myself a planetary miner based on this beautiful contraption (battery powered, 2 Large Containers, connector at back ...).

When I've got finally to test it, I've found out it cannot go on unloading ramp without scratching it's belly (nor align connector with connector at base).
I looked at wheel suspension - they were quite down, while their Height Offset was at lowest setting.
So I increased the suspension strength (from default 6% to around 20%). Suspension went up and all looked ok without belly-scratching (and connector aligns nicely).

But the wheels at the back now explode violently at random times, sending the miner spinning in to the air and destroying whole miner's back in the process, scattering its pieces farther than suicide bomber ...

What shall I do to avoid that random wheel explosion ? Or some workaround that I can apply ... I'd like not to disable "Destructible Blocks".

 

It's a bug that's been around for some time now. I use landing gears and wheel offset set to minimum. If I want to drill or park my "siege tower", I increase the offset, lock the gears and do my things. I lost maybe 6 or 7 rovers before understanding what's happening

 

After the wheel update I made a wheeled planetary miner which worked extremely well. Are you sure your wheels aren't bottoming out the suspension too hard and exploding because of that? Having more wheels really helps. Fill in as many wheels as you can and have a couple of them, higher up, with really strong suspension so that it's much harder to bottom out the wheels you use to drive around.

 

Hi, I was wondering if you could tell me how you made the miner in the 2nd image.

Thanks

E

 

I don't play with the scarce resources, but I usually build a smal grid stripe miner that has 18 drills, a large cargo container, a O2/H2 Generator and 2 large and a lot of small atmo thrusters. A sorter/ejector-combo for stone ejection and a PB with a script that keeps it horizontal. It's not automatic, but I can get a vein in shortest time. I have a large reactor for longer operations time, but usually it works with just two batteries and has an operation time of aprox. 45min if both batteries are fully charged.

 

I know is an old thread and hopefully, the OP found a solution. If you haven't seen it yet there is a very handy script to use now:
[PAM] Path Auto Miner | Autonomous mining and grinding script by Keks

 

I have to disagree.
While the script is extremely helpful, convenient and for sure it eases mining a lot, it relies on flying vehicles => it just CAN'T be energetically effective.

 

Just going by what he posted seems like he was going for the flying approach.