Factorio Forums

TL;DR

After you get past the initial low-tech part of the game, you are greeted with electricity and electric mining drills, which are what you stick with for the rest of the game.

What:

A faster, more expensive, electricity-heavy mining drill. Possibly a 5x5 drill with a 6x6 mining range, at 3 times the speed of an ordinary drill and slots for 3 enhancement modules.

Why:

Electric mining drills are your main miner for almost the entire game. I find that when I am playing Factorio, even when I use multiple mining locations and drills (With speed modules), I still can't feed my massive furnace line.

This has been suggested quite some times, here are a few previous suggestions :
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=514
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=41588
I think if devs planned to add more, they'd have done so long ago, so you'll have to stick with mods, there are quite a lot of thems that add advanced mining drills :
https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Laserzwei/BigDrills
https://mods.factorio.com/mods/yobudal/ ... ls-Tweaked

https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Bobingabout/bobmining
Adds higher tier mining drills, and other things related to mining. (Check options in game to select exactly what it gives you)

But I agree, the base game should add some kind of mining drill MK2 for the later stages.

I would argue that what is needed isn't better miners, but better smelters. As you invest in mining efficiency, you need fewer and fewer miners to saturate belts, yet you are still bottlenecked by smelting. In reality, a better smelter would perhaps process the ore better and/or faster to increase productivity (without modules). Smelting setups are already huge due to their inefficiencies, even with modules and beacons.

With an optimized smelting line (prod 3 modules in electric furnaces, beacons with speed 3 modules), you need ridiculously few smelters to saturate a blue belt.

Koub wrote:With an optimized smelting line (prod 3 modules in electric furnaces, beacons with speed 3 modules), you need ridiculously few smelters to saturate a blue belt.

Depends on what you mean by "ridiculously few" . Are too many miners needed with productivity 100? 200? 1,000?

How many years would one need in a vanilla playthrough, to achieve such ridiculous productivity researches ?

Koub wrote:How many years would one need in a vanilla playthrough, to achieve such ridiculous productivity researches ?

Ha. Well, here's one person who got to mining productivity 275 in "only" 330 hours:
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... _where_it/

And I don't get the impression this person was necessarily rushing. Just playing with experience.

As for myself, I'm only a week into my second serious map ever, and haven't yet graduated from the standard main bus setup. But I can see how a large scale train-based factory can get you to 400 mining productivity in a fairly reasonable amount of time (I saw someone recently post about having achieved that but I can't find it).

End game mining is already impacted by infinite research so it is not going to be too big of a problem.

However smelting is the culprit of all end game cause smelting setups even fully optimized with beacons take rediculously large space.

I do understand that it is a way to add complexity for the player to solve resulting logistical problems but I think that smelter MK2 is much more needed than drill MK2.
As of smelter MK2 I would expect it having speed at 3-4 with 4 module slots.

The problem with drills is that you most likely won't ever use productivity or speed modules in them cause it will lead to enormous pollution and will most likely attract biters to the site. This is why people complain them being too slow.
Smelters however are located deep inside defence perimeter and can benefit from those.

There already are 3 types of furnaces, so basically an MK1, MK2 and MK3. But only 2 types of miners. I think it would make sense to have a have a 3rd kind of miner that adds a fluid intake, like mining Uranium has now. This could carry water as cooling fluid for a faster drill bit. So you get faster mining but also a new challenge.

I'm no fan of larger mining drills. I try to pack drills as close as possible to increase the output per second. The only "benefit" of a larger drill area would be that you can place drills further outside the ore field. So you get some extra drills but they look ridiculous being outside the ore field. So better a faster drill than a larger one.

mrvn wrote:There already are 3 types of furnaces, so basically an MK1, MK2 and MK3.

Eeeeehhhhh... Wouldn't it be more like the basic furnace and steel furnace are MK1 and MK2 for coal-fired, and electric is MK1 of its kind?

Splitting hairs anyway. Many people have requested more specific kinds of mining machines AND smelters, so in reality the devs could redesign or expand upon the approach to both.