Factorio Forums

example. if i found the best spot with highest expected resources, should I put the drill there, or it doesnt matter anyway because it will drill the whole tiles of the drill? because if i place my drilling on the highest output, its going to messed up the placing of the electric pole also, since the radius of it at the start of the game is small

Electric mining drill mines all 9 tiles under it, and also the 16 tiles adjacent to it. A 5x5 square.

What can matter is getting the most miners possible on a patch, so you get more materials per second/minute. At least on the relatively small patches you start with.
You can maximize that by using underground belts for the output belt and putting the power poles in the gaps. Rather than putting the power poles between the miners (the space with the power poles will be mined regardless, as said above). That can get you another row of miners in some cases. But it's not strictly necessary.

There is less ore at the edges of a patch and those miners will deplete faster. But you still want to get those materials.

The rate (items/second) of the electric mining drill's throughput is fixed at 1 item every 2 seconds (0.5 i/s) for all resources except uranium. For uranium you get 1 item every 4 seconds. In both cases I am assuming that you have no mining productivity researched yet. Otherwise the number of items per second increases appropriately.

The amount of expected resources just tells you for how long (approximately) the mining drill can mine at that location. The amount of expected resources is the sum of the resources in the 5×5 square surrounding the electric mining drill. Mining productivity research additionally increases the produced resources, making the expected resources actually a low estimate.

You have usually three choices:

1. If you want to maximize total throughput, you should try to fit as many mining drills as possible with overlapping mining area – regardless of the expected resources.
2. If you want to minimize the amount of machines, you should try to completely cover a resource patch with as few mining drills as possible, minimizing their overlap.
3. If you want to produce at the same rate as you consume, or at ratio, you need 5 electric mining drills for every 8 stone furnaces, or 5 electric mining drills for every 4 steel/electric furnaces (disregarding mining productivity and modules).

In any case you will have to transport the mined resources. Assuming you do that via transport belts, you have to be careful about the throughput of the individual belts, and how many mining drills you use to feed one belt:

• 1 yellow belt == 15 items/second == 30 electric mining drills (15 per belt lane)
• 1 red belt == 30 items/second == 60 electric mining drills (30 per belt lane)
• 1 blue belt == 45 items/second == 90 electric mining drills (45 per belt lane)

If you have too many mining drills/too few belts, some mining drills will have a blocked output and not in fact be mining. If, on the other hand, you have too few mining drills, the belts will not be fully compressed.
With these numbers in mind, you see that 30 electric mining drills fill 1 yellow belt which can feed 30×8∕5 = 48 stone furnaces.

Overall, we can conclude that the "expected resources" hardly matters. Just keep in mind that you might want to deconstruct mining drills that ran out of mineable resources. Don't forget to continue expanding to reach new resource patches as the old ones dry out. And all of the above calculations need to be adapted once you have mining productivity researched, or you start using modules.

I prefer not too much effort into mines. Instead I use a setup, that is quick and easy to build and plan. I build all drills in rows right next to each other facing the belt. Also I leave one tile between the rows for electric poles and to be able to run in between the miners. That way I don't need to pay attention on exact placement. I can simply run in straight lines through the field and hold my mouse pressed to place everything.

Furthermore I don't place the exact amount of drills that I need. For example when I calculate that I need 50 drills for a red belt, I place 60 or 70 so that the belt will always be filled even when the first drills run out of ore.

Of course you could calculate and place everything exact and super dense. But I will fail as soon as the first fields are depleted. At some point you will need to connect further, more distant ore fields anyway. I'm not convinced it's worth putting much effort in it from the beginning.

I do not pay attention to how many miners I have feeding a belt, as long as it is more than enough to fully feed the belt. I like having 40 or 50 miners on a belt instead of merely 30; it ensures that as one runs out another is ready to take up the slack.

If a patch is sized in a manner that has me with a belt that has less than the 30 miners, I am not above routing some other miners’ output onto that belt, in order to exceed the 30, as long as it does not cut the other belt’s miner count down below 30.

Although Mining Productivity reduces the number of miners needed on a belt to fill it, I tend to ignore this; mines will still eventually run out and I’d rather have the spares already in place.

JapaneseMom wrote: ↑

Sun Sep 13, 2020 1:29 am

example. if i found the best spot with highest expected resources, should I put the drill there, or it doesnt matter anyway because it will drill the whole tiles of the drill? because if i place my drilling on the highest output, its going to messed up the placing of the electric pole also, since the radius of it at the start of the game is small

So just to be clear, you should use more than one mining drill on a patch.