How do YOU use mining drills?

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Blitz4
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How do YOU use mining drills?

Post by Blitz4 »

I'm curious what tricks you're using. It seems to take a long time, but I do it so much and try to squeeze all I can out of it.


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My rule is 500 or more ore per electric miner. It's working out well. To setup this coal patch, first find the top, left, bottom and right edge where the miners go. The first patch I can get that's 500 or more ore marks the edge. After doing that on all 4 sides. Drag miners connecting the top & bottom, then the left & right. That shows me if there's any gaps. After a couple minutes of rearranging to remove the gaps. Then I can count many miners would be used if going up/down vs. left/right. In vanilla that's 15 miners on each side. (FYI. Using copy, cut, or the decon tool - all 3 let you easily count them).

vertical vs horizontal. If one direction has 16 or more on any side, then I go the other way. If one is 13 and another is 15. I'm going with the 15 which may reduce the number of belts I have to manage. If the 13 vs 15 output the same number of belts. That's when I open the map and choose vertical vs horizontal. In the pic I have to add extra room for automated balancing.

After placing the mines. Next is to remove all mines that have under 500 ore. So far that rule has guaranteed that I'm not missing ore.

Then the power poles. At the ore output, closest to the edge of the ore patch, that electric miner there gets powered by a pole 1 tile away from it (in the pic). The rest of the poles are simple, it's 1 tile short of the max power poles range. Copy and paste. Then dragging belt over the poles creates the undergrounds. Copy & paste the balancers at each end. Then the reducer, in this case it's a 6:5. I find balancers like in the pic are easier to lay down and make more sense than looking up a 6:5 balancer which would work here. Those balancers I only see useful when there's robots and lots of resources flying over your head.


That's what I do. I want to believe we're all different. How do you handle it?
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Re: How do YOU use mining drills?

Post by mmmPI »

I do the opposite, i put them as far away as possible while still leaving no gap and covering every ore tile most of the time.

My reasonning is that replacing mining drill is annoying, so when i place 1 i make sure it will last long. :ugeek:

An imaginary situation to illustrate is having 20 iron patch that contain 2 millions ore each around your base, for a total of 40 millions on the map easily accessible from start.

You can try to squeeze say 50 miners on a single patch. Or you can try to spread on as much surface as possible so they do not overlap over different patches, in such case instead of having only 1 ore patch covered, you can maybe cover 2 or 3 with the same 50 miners.

It takes less time to cover a single ore patch when you want to start mining there, because the blueprints are not so dense, and it will provide the same amount of iron, slower but over longer time.

This is good, to me because it makes it easier to ramp up the number of mining drills.

In the imaginary situation the risk is that you put all mining drill on a single patch, and then 10 minutes later you need to move them to the 2nd closest patch, and 10 minutes laters to the 3rd and so on, always being chasing for new ressources. Instead of waiting 30 minutes to then cover 3 patches again which can give you more time to move far away or build bigger things.

I try to combine at the micro level , the blueprint design, the way i prefer doing at a macro level, the occupation or ore patch.

It also make it so that on average each mining drills cover more ore, if they do not overlap. This in turn means that for the same number of mining drill between two different factories, each level of productivity research is giving more extra ressource, in the factory that have mining drill not overlapping.

Now to be even more efficient i shouldn't be doing that, but i count it as a self imposed challenge, i try to cover every single bit of ore, even if it means sometimes i have to place a mining drill with only 237 irons under it or something. In such case, i would probably stick around during consctruction to make sure i can remove it before i leave.

I can do exceptions to this general rule though, when ore patch are in locations where i plan to build factory i could squeeze mining drill much to remove ore faster and make way.

I like rail world with even rarer ressources, but more richness, and i tend to transform other settings into such configuration when i can :)
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Re: How do YOU use mining drills?

Post by Tertius »

Resource patches more far away are 60x60 tiles at maximum, so I created a blueprint in map editor that covers this area in a manner similar to your screenshot (miners next to each other, 1 tile space for power poles). At one end, there is a station in the blueprint including a waiting area for 2 additional trains.

So whenever I create a new mine, I put the blueprint over the resource patch, so it is most near to the station and every single tile of ore is covered. The only thing left now is to connect the dangling rail to my rail network. One miner is wired and reads the amount of resources of the whole field, so a programmable speaker will raise an alert if the resource field has 0 resources and therefore is depleted, so I can deconstruct it.

Uranium ore patches are slightly different. They cover only 40x40 tiles at max and need sulfuric acid supply, so my uranium ore trains have 1 additional wagon that brings sulfuric acid out and brings uranium ore in return.

Oil patches are different as well. Unfortunately the pumpjacks have to be placed manually due to their random layout. So my oil mine blueprint only has the station and the storage tank infrastructure.
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Re: How do YOU use mining drills?

Post by MeduSalem »

mmmPI wrote: ↑
Sun Mar 03, 2024 8:02 am
I do the opposite, i put them as far away as possible while still leaving no gap and covering every ore tile most of the time.

My reasonning is that replacing mining drill is annoying, so when i place 1 i make sure it will last long. :ugeek:
Same here.
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Re: How do YOU use mining drills?

Post by FuryoftheStars »

For me, I don't care about how much ore any of the drills are covering. Once they run out, who cares? They don't use energy while idle.
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Re: How do YOU use mining drills?

Post by mmmPI »

FuryoftheStars wrote: ↑
Sun Mar 03, 2024 3:18 pm
 For me, I don't care about how much ore any of the drills are covering. Once they run out, who cares? They don't use energy while idle.
Would you say the same for legendary big mining drill ?

They would not cost more energy when idle, but the "lost value" would be intuitively bigger to me. Because they would not be paying back for themselves during that time it would decrease the value of previously spent energy and ore needed to make the drill.
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Re: How do YOU use mining drills?

Post by FuryoftheStars »

mmmPI wrote: ↑
Sun Mar 03, 2024 3:32 pm
FuryoftheStars wrote: ↑
Sun Mar 03, 2024 3:18 pm
 For me, I don't care about how much ore any of the drills are covering. Once they run out, who cares? They don't use energy while idle.
Would you say the same for legendary big mining drill ?

They would not cost more energy when idle, but the "lost value" would be intuitively bigger to me. Because they would not be paying back for themselves during that time it would decrease the value of previously spent energy and ore needed to make the drill.
Maybe, maybe not.

Ultimately, I'm not concerned enough to do what the OP describes to make sure that left/right and top/bottom are equally distributed across the patch. But if I'm using one of my larger BPs and it happens to cover the whole patch, then I may move the mouse back and forth a bit to see how it affects the miners on the edges. But I also use the BP design where the miners are really packed together alternating with undergrounds, so sometimes this has an unpredictable result on them.

That being said, I may not use the big ones in that packed of a pattern, either. I don't know yet as they're not available to try out. ;)
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Re: How do YOU use mining drills?

Post by mmmPI »

FuryoftheStars wrote: ↑
Sun Mar 03, 2024 5:10 pm
 Maybe, maybe not.
That being said, I may not use the big ones in that packed of a pattern, either. I don't know yet as they're not available to try out. ;)
That make sense we can't really gauge the cost of a legendary big mining drill ( full of legendary modules ) just now. And the topic is about oone current way of doing. I meant also as an example of opportunity cost. There is a relation between the cost of initial investment, how fast it produce and how much one would "lose" with idle miner.
FuryoftheStars wrote: ↑
Sun Mar 03, 2024 5:10 pm
 But if I'm using one of my larger BPs and it happens to cover the whole patch, then I may move the mouse back and forth a bit to see how it affects the miners on the edges.
I do that too late game, in order to find how to position the BP to cover everything with the least amount of drills, I also do lane per lane sometimes and i add some mining drill to cover the extras :
blueprint per lane.png
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If you do like this you can run with the power pole the autoplace will connect vertically all the mines despite the occasionnal 1 tile offset due to the extra belt but you need a lateral connexion that i add where i merge the lane and do the train loading station.
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Re: How do YOU use mining drills?

Post by MeduSalem »

mmmPI wrote: ↑
Sun Mar 03, 2024 8:11 pm
FuryoftheStars wrote: ↑
Sun Mar 03, 2024 5:10 pm
 Maybe, maybe not.
That being said, I may not use the big ones in that packed of a pattern, either. I don't know yet as they're not available to try out. ;)
That make sense we can't really gauge the cost of a legendary big mining drill ( full of legendary modules ) just now. And the topic is about oone current way of doing. I meant also as an example of opportunity cost. There is a relation between the cost of initial investment, how fast it produce and how much one would "lose" with idle miner.
I agree with mmmPi on the opportunity cost problem.


Yet even without Legendary machines or the Big Miner, it is already a huge opportunity cost if you intent to use modules with them.
So the more resources you can mine per miner and the more you can avoid miners from stalling and doing nothing, the more their investment pays off.


But with the Legendary/Big Miners that opportunity cost will be in a whole different league.
The Big Miners require Tungsten. So it either requires shipping the Tungsten or the Big Miners to other planets; adding a cost ontop of the miner itself.
And the Legendary stuff will be a resource drain no matter if one goes the classic route of "acquire as they happen" or if you go the "recycle until I have it" route. Ontop of possibly shipping the machines.


So I think the sooner one switches over to a more "thoughtful" placement of the miners the faster it becomes a habit.
At least stamping miners as tightly as possible is not really as good of a strategy when it causes them to idle around a whole lot. Idle miners equal resources & effort you could have better spent elsewhere.


And it is not really worth either to mine ahead-of-time into chests to justify going overboard on the miners. Because ore in the ground is more worth it while it is still in the ground because of later Mining Productivity research giving you more in return (up to a certain point where the additional productivity return won't be worth the resources invested into researching it). But in general... the longer they can stay in the ground the better.



I mean in the end one can always not give a damn about it at all, because there is tons more resources behind the horizon and one has not to care about how efficiently one mines stuff and what the payback time of machinery is. But if we are talking about doing it efficiently, like is OPs intention (I assume) then his way of doing it not the best. ^^
Last edited by MeduSalem on Sun Mar 03, 2024 9:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: How do YOU use mining drills?

Post by FuryoftheStars »

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, in context of the current miners and 1.1, the costs of them compared to the factory as a whole and all the resources I'm mining up are negligible. I mean, when the resource patches are getting into the billions before taking productivity into account, for me, personally, it doesn't matter. :)
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Re: How do YOU use mining drills?

Post by MeduSalem »

FuryoftheStars wrote: ↑
Sun Mar 03, 2024 9:27 pm
 Yeah, I don't know. I mean, in context of the current miners and 1.1, the costs of them compared to the factory as a whole and all the resources I'm mining up are negligible. I mean, when the resource patches are getting into the billions before taking productivity into account, for me, personally, it doesn't matter. :)
True, that in the grand aspect it does not really matter that much, or only as much as one cares about it.

It is what I edited in as a bottom line, before you beat me to it. ;D
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Re: How do YOU use mining drills?

Post by Tertius »

MeduSalem wrote: ↑
Sun Mar 03, 2024 8:54 pm
 And it is not really worth either to mine ahead-of-time into chests to justify going overboard on the miners. Because ore in the ground is more worth it while it is still in the ground because of later Mining Productivity research giving you more in return
It seems so, but the real worth of ore in the ground is that it's out of the way. Don't process stuff until you really need it. You still have all options.
I just reorganized my current map, converting old mines with 4 wagon stations to "new" mines with 8 wagons. And I tell you, this is a chore. The ore is sticky filth in your inventory, filling and congesting everything. Deconstruct belts with ore - it ends up in your inventory. Try to move the full station chests to their new position - impossible. You cannot just move 4 chests, each full with 2.4 k ore. Yes, picker dollies mod, but it's still a chore. Electricity connected one moment too soon, and everything's filled and covered again. Argh!
I was at the point to just fire up some artillery on the outposts just to get rid of it all, but I didn't have the heart to do it in the end.
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Re: How do YOU use mining drills?

Post by MeduSalem »

Tertius wrote: ↑
Sun Mar 03, 2024 9:41 pm
It seems so, but the real worth of ore in the ground is that it's out of the way. Don't process stuff until you really need it. You still have all options.
I just reorganized my current map, converting old mines with 4 wagon stations to "new" mines with 8 wagons. And I tell you, this is a chore. The ore is sticky filth in your inventory, filling and congesting everything. Deconstruct belts with ore - it ends up in your inventory. Try to move the full station chests to their new position - impossible. You cannot just move 4 chests, each full with 2.4 k ore. Yes, picker dollies mod, but it's still a chore. Electricity connected one moment too soon, and everything's filled and covered again. Argh!
I was at the point to just fire up some artillery on the outposts just to get rid of it all, but I didn't have the heart to do it in the end.
Hahaha. Yea. I know that feeling. I absolutely did that too until a few years back. I told myself "I have to mine everything" and such. ^^

So in my most advanced map I ever had I had that huge array of chests with that 5-6million stone (among several more all over the place). Eventually it got on my nerves because it was in the way; I wanted to use the land differently. And trying to get it out of the way just as annoying as you describe.

I eventually ended up just blasting all the chests with the shotgun.

That was the last time I ever mined anything ahead-of-time. I will never do it again unless I absolutely have to for some weird reason. But if I can avoid it, i won't. Even if it means being a blasphemous madman... by building stuff over a resource patch. ^^
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Re: How do YOU use mining drills?

Post by mmmPI »

Tertius wrote: ↑
Sun Mar 03, 2024 9:41 pm
 Deconstruct belts with ore - it ends up in your inventory. Try to move the full station chests to their new position - impossible. You cannot just move 4 chests, each full with 2.4 k ore. Yes, picker dollies mod, but it's still a chore.
I was at the point to just fire up some artillery on the outposts just to get rid of it all, but I didn't have the heart to do it in the end.
There is also the purple chest in temporary small isolated network solution, where you isolate say 20 or 50 robotport or more if you need all next to each other with no connection to outside larger network. And then you "fast replace" the steel chest with purple chest and wait for the swarm to do the job. If you have 2.4k robots, and their carrying capacity is 4, it is only 1 trip per robot ;)

I have done chest destruction numerous time, it feels to me sometimes like advancing to next chapter, "oh i can get rid of that wooden chest filled with half iron plate and half steel plate from that previous deconstruction, i'm no longer at early game anymore to the point where the factory couldn't provide such material on demand easily" //least trouble solution. And even later in game is the robot fast replace lazy thing which solve same problem in more satisfying way// least trouble AND wasteless.
MeduSalem wrote: ↑
Sun Mar 03, 2024 9:49 pm
 That was the last time I ever mined anything ahead-of-time. I will never do it again unless I absolutely have to for some weird reason. But if I can avoid it, i won't. Even if it means being a blasphemous madman... by building stuff over a resource patch. ^^
Building over a ressource patch is a mistake i did in some of my first game when i run out of starting iron ore because i built things on the iron patch and i had to move them around all the time; Experiencing that very problem mentionned earlier :D

I agree that in the long run ressources are infinite, it doesn't matter to waste some iron, "unless" it causes the player to in turn feel constrained to always keep adding outpost. Which can be caused by building on top of the (rare) ressources patches and not finding a new patch of said ressources easily afterward. It depend on the map and ressource distribution/ease of access = initial investment. But not only ressources or energy, but player time is a ressource, you invest time to make outpost, and/or maintain defend it for it to provide ressources.

In that regard, spreading out miner forces a player to protect a larger area for the same output, making it more difficult to defend. But in turn, spreading out miners causes pollution to also be spread out accross more land, reducing the ratio of biter spawned per ore extracted.

Part of the thing in doing the mining drill is overthinking it no ?
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Re: How do YOU use mining drills?

Post by MeduSalem »

mmmPI wrote: ↑
Mon Mar 04, 2024 4:16 pm
Building over a ressource patch is a mistake i did in some of my first game when i run out of starting iron ore because i built things on the iron patch and i had to move them around all the time; Experiencing that very problem mentionned earlier :D
Well, good. I am obviously not building over a resource patch that I know I will need in a while from now and that will be mined out in a reasonable timeframe. Then I will try to build my factory around that until it is mined. More so in early game when you don't have all the tools to spread out yet.

But whether I build some part of the Factory or drag Rail network over some stone patch which I know I will never need; or a small patch of other resources that I don't feel is worth the effort of going the extra mile of setting up an extra outpost for... well I don't care about that anymore. I build over that if it is in the way and live with it. I am sure some of my maps would trigger the OCD of some people because there are a couple spots with small amounts of ore here and there and I don't care to mine it, and instead built some infrastructure right above it. xD
mmmPI wrote: ↑
Mon Mar 04, 2024 4:16 pm
Part of the thing in doing the mining drill is overthinking it no ?
Overthinking everything. That is Factorio life. Or basically of any game that is somewhat similar. ^^
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Re: How do YOU use mining drills?

Post by Nosferatu »

How do I do it?

Spaced out - Slow mining - slow loading - I don't care how many mines I need as long as they are easy to build and easy I to remove.
That's why there is only a single rail line to the grid and no power connection - see attached screenshot

And of course over engineered as much as I can ;)
Tertius wrote: ↑
Sun Mar 03, 2024 11:59 am
 ...One miner is wired and reads the amount of resources of the whole field, so a programmable speaker will raise an alert if the resource field has 0 resources and therefore is depleted, so I can deconstruct it.
How good does that work for you?
I tried it but if the connected miner has depleted it's ressources it looses connection to the ressource field and shows 0 prematurely.
At current I monitor the chests with a clock based counter to see if the field is still mining...
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Re: How do YOU use mining drills?

Post by GregoriusT »

Am I overdoing it? I think I am overdoing it.
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The tileable and environmentally friendly War Crimes Mining Drill Blueprint!
Who needs Mining Lamps when you can have MINING LANDMINES!!!
Don't underestimate Landmines!
Biters bite, Spitters spit, Spawners spawn and Worms... worm? - No, they throw their vomit! They even wind up to directly hurl it at you! friggin Hurlers...
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Re: How do YOU use mining drills?

Post by Tertius »

Nosferatu wrote: ↑
Mon Mar 04, 2024 7:18 pm
Tertius wrote: ↑
Sun Mar 03, 2024 11:59 am
 ...One miner is wired and reads the amount of resources of the whole field, so a programmable speaker will raise an alert if the resource field has 0 resources and therefore is depleted, so I can deconstruct it.
How good does that work for you?
I tried it but if the connected miner has depleted it's ressources it looses connection to the ressource field and shows 0 prematurely.
I admit this is the latest enhancement I added, and I only tested this in map editor. And yes, as far as I remember, it didn't lose connection to the original field. As long as you don't touch the miner that's reading the field, for example don't mark it for deconstruction (no auto deconstruct mod), it will report the whole field if set to read the whole field in the first place. You must not change the setting after the initial build.

I explicitly tested the case (in map editor) where I created a very sparse resource field that soon got defragmented into many distinct resource fields during mining. However, as long as the one miner stayed in place and I didn't change anything with its configuration, it reported for the original resource field that included all the defragmented small fields. It seems the miner takes a snapshot of all tiles of a resource field at construction or at connection time of the circuit network and reports the numbers for these tiles.
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Re: How do YOU use mining drills?

Post by mmmPI »

Tertius wrote: ↑
Mon Mar 04, 2024 11:10 pm
 I explicitly tested the case (in map editor) where I created a very sparse resource field that soon got defragmented into many distinct resource fields during mining. However, as long as the one miner stayed in place and I didn't change anything with its configuration, it reported for the original resource field that included all the defragmented small fields. It seems the miner takes a snapshot of all tiles of a resource field at construction or at connection time of the circuit network and reports the numbers for these tiles.
That make me think of the map view, when you hover a patch, sometimes the game recognize the disconnected fragment as 1 ore patch and shows a single amount when you hover it, but it can also happen that it gets split and when hovering you can see like 34 k and 65 k at a very very close distance.That's a risky business i would say, the wiring a single miner. But maybe it's just me who didn't do properly last time i attempted.

There's also ways with combinator to detect when the belts are empty, to make the last train that is not filled to leave the place and the outpost closing itself. Provided it's not due to power shortage it can help keeping trains running in larges bases with many non-rich outpost that deplete often.
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Re: How do YOU use mining drills?

Post by Tertius »

mmmPI wrote: ↑
Mon Mar 04, 2024 11:24 pm
 There's also ways with combinator to detect when the belts are empty, to make the last train that is not filled to leave the place and the outpost closing itself. Provided it's not due to power shortage it can help keeping trains running in larges bases with many non-rich outpost that deplete often.
The problem with automatically closing an outpost is that there now too many trains. You need to decommission the trains associated with that mining outpost as well. At least that's the case in my current train design: completely static. I have exactly as many trains as there are slots in the mining outposts. If I remove an outpost, I need to remove its trains as well. Otherwise I risk a deadlock.

My plan is to create a new mining outpost first when my custom "outpost depleted" alert appears. Afterwards, I drive to the depleted outpost, send the trains waiting there away to a different mine (will probably drive to the new outpost), then deconstruct the old outpost. Without mods, I don't see potential for more automation.

About detecting mine depletion by reading belts: Yes, that's an option that can be better tested. However, it requires 2 or 3 more combinators. Too much for only that one situation that happens only once in the lifetime of a mining outpost. I try to keep outposts stripped to the bare minimum. In the past, I created the most sophisticated outposts, with supply to build the outpost itself, automated train limit, wall defense, laser turrets, even artillery, bots and more bells and whistles, but I realized it's all not necessary. One combinator for balanced chest loading, one for depletion detection, everything else is purely mechanical and protected by a single huge rectangular perimeter defense.
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