Factorio Forums

An upgraded Mining Drill that mines 2x as fast as the Electric Mining Drill and you can filter what it mines. It also has a circuit network condition like the one in a smart inserter.

Why would you need the filter? Only reason I could see is if you have 2 conjoining ore veins and you only want one of the ore, but that is rare from what I see. Unless you need this for mods which add more ores (in which case, this being added as a mod would make more sense). Also, the progression (via name) doesn't go in line with the furnaces (stone->steel-> electric vs iron->electric->steel???).

You can add speed modules to double (and more!) the speed of the current drills as well.

Circuit network condition would be nice, but I think that can be added to the electric drill instead.

Overlapping ore patches does happen in the vanilla game, and it would indeed be nice to have a more advanced Mining Drill that automatically copes with that, mining onnly the kind of stuff it's been told to mine.

I'm also super keen on the idea of a Mining Drill with a 7x7 mining area. Not quite sure why I am, but I am.

You can use smart inserters to pull contaminents out of the ore stream.

Maybe a Smart Mining Drill instead of Steel Mining Drill? I had some problems with some coal right next to lots of iron ore. The Smart Inserters helped a bit, but a drill that would only mine certain ores is really nice.

This is already possible (and available) as mod since v0.7. Guess why this isn't added to the vanilla?

ssilk wrote:This is already possible (and available) as mod since v0.7. Guess why this isn't added to the vanilla?

Hi Ssilk, could you be more precise ?
I search for a filtering mining drill, but i did not find one...

Sorry, for late answer.

This was meant very generally: The possibility to mod a mining drill is already in the game. All what's needed is to hook into the event, when a mining drill creates a new item and do "stuff". Which is also possible.

What I didn't mean was, that there are already smart mining drills. I doubt that there are any, cause it doesn't make sense.

I don't see the need for this, cause it's part of the game to place the mining drills so, that the output is sorted. Or you build setup, that is able to sort the unneeded stuff out. The rest is modding, which this is about.

ssilk wrote:This was meant very generally: The possibility to mod a mining drill is already in the game. All what's needed is to hook into the event, when a mining drill creates a new item and do "stuff". Which is also possible.

Sorry to come back, but I'm still interested in a filtering drill and try write a mod, so what event are you talking about ? I looked at the event list but does not find something like it.
http://lua-api.factorio.com/0.12.30/events.html

There is an on_robot_mined(). This means u can use an (unmoveable) robot instead of a mining drill to mine stuff. But that means, you need to do everything yourself (search for a minable item, mine it and place it afterwards).
And if that event is missing it's also a hint from the devs, that it is not a good idea to hand into that event, because there are too many to handle them effectively by lua.But this goes completely off-topic here, you can ask in modding-help about that or look into other mods.