Factorio Forums

TL;DR

It would be nice to allow the player to change the order the mining drill consumes the ore tiles.

What ?

Currently, the game seems to mine the ore tiles starting at the outside of its mining area and moving inwards. When the ore
field is drying up, this causes each mining drill to sit on a strip of ore in the middle of its mining area, preventing other
adjacent mining drills from helping out mining that ore. I think that if the mining drill instead started mining from the center
of its mining area and moving outwards, adjacent mining drills could be useful for a longer time, since they could help out
mining the ore at the edge of other mining drills' mining area.

This could either be an option in the mining drill interface (which would have to allow copying using shift and left/right click,
just like when you copy the settings of assemblers, oil refineries, etc), or it could be a global option in the game settings.

Why ?

Currently, if you want an ore field to keep producing at its maximum rate as long as possible, you have to clear out the mining
drills and shift them a few tiles to the side, to allow several mining drills access to each strip of ore. This is tedious and could be
avoided with this change.

Actually, the mining order is random. The reason why you might think it starts from outside, and inwards is because there are statistically more ore in the middle tiles than on border tiles.

Koub wrote:Actually, the mining order is random. The reason why you might think it starts from outside, and inwards is because there are statistically more ore in the middle tiles than on border tiles.

Almost, the order isn't random - it's top left -> right bottom and it cycles until all ore is gone.

You're correct on the 2nd part though which is why it looks like it mines outward -> inward.

I don't think the original poster is talking about the richness across the patch; they're talking about the 25 tiles of a particular drill's mining area. In common mining layouts with the drills directly adjacent to each other on one axis with belts inbetween rows, the 20 tiles to the "left" and "right" of each drill will be mined twice as fast as the 5 tiles down the "middle" of each drill, because they're covered by two drills.

"Fixing" that would require that the drill focus on a particular tile until it's gone, instead of cycling through them all evenly, because no matter the order you cycle through them the overlapping tiles are still going to be mined twice as often - it would have to mine out the center tiles entirely before beginning to mine the outer tiles.

However, that won't actually give much improvement in mining speed in most cases - if you have N miners in a row which have all depleted to the point that only the non-overlapping tiles still have any ore in them, then moving the row so that they overlap again will only improve your total mining speed from N to N+1, because you can't possibly fit more than one extra miner in there. You won't get any better improvement than that by changing the mining pattern either.

I'm not sure I'd want it, but it seems this could be achieved by having the miners always take ore from the most abundant tile they have access to.

Spreading the drills to have always 2 tiles between two drills works surprisingly well too

Koub wrote:Spreading the drills to have always 2 tiles between two drills works surprisingly well too

That just guarantees you a slower mining speed for the entire lifetime of the patch, though

Who cares ? It will finish depleted, like everything else. I just won't have to deconstruct the outpost as early, that's all.

If you need a certain amount of ore every minute to make your factory run, then you need a certain number of miners to supply that ore. Spreading that same number of miners out means claiming more patches *now*, instead of later when the nearer patches start to run out; there's fewer upfront costs in terms of clearing land, building defenses and infrastructure, if you squish them closer together.

If your miners aren't all running at close to full utilisation all the time, then it doesn't matter very much.