Filter Miners

[Cronie]

TL;DR

Electric Mining Drills which would only mine ores of one type.

What ?

One problem I have is overlapping ore types ... like coal and copper, iron and stone. The output contains both ore types which then must be separated. It is bothersome to place mining drills carefully or to set up filter inserters to "clean" the output, as this slows throughput down.

I suggest adding an item called a Filter Miner. This would look exactly like the current mining drills, but would have the ability to mine only one type of ore. Perhaps it could have an interface similar to a filter inserter.

Example: You place one on a bed of ore containing copper and stone. You click it to open the interface and select copper. The Filter Miner then only mines the copper and ignore the stone.

As for crafting, I would suggest a recipe of a filter inserter or maybe a stack filter inserter and a regular mining drill. Maybe some extra green and/or red circuits too

Why ?

I believe this would improve the game by reducing of the inconvenience associated with mining.

Thank you for reading!

[Factorie]

It's such a niche issue. I don't see adding a whole new item being needed for this fix. Maybe have it so miners only mine the ore with the most resource?

[Rseding91]

There's already filter inserters which can handle mixed resources.

[Cronie]

There's already filter inserters which can handle mixed resources.

well, that is disappointing

[British_Petroleum]

someone could probably make a mod that adds a filtered mining drill

[Cronie]

someone could probably make a mod that adds a filtered mining drill

I don't believe in mods.

Edit: i mean, I believe they exist, I just don't believe in using them

[bobingabout]

Especially with the inclusion of uranium ore, I think this is very much needed.
in my starting area, the good patch of copper is overlapping with a small patch of uranium. I have to be careful not to place a drill in a location where the two overlap, because otherwise the miner switches to try and mine the uranium, finds it has no sulfuric acid, and stalls.

I suppose this could be avoided a different way though, if there were 2 tiers of electric mining drill, and only the second had input pipes. That way uranium could be set as a different mining category, and both categories added to the MK2 drill, where the original only has basic ores.

[Cronie]

Especially with the inclusion of uranium ore, I think this is very much needed.
in my starting area, the good patch of copper is overlapping with a small patch of uranium. I have to be careful not to place a drill in a location where the two overlap, because otherwise the miner switches to try and mine the uranium, finds it has no sulfuric acid, and stalls.

I suppose this could be avoided a different way though, if there were 2 tiers of electric mining drill, and only the second had input pipes. That way uranium could be set as a different mining category, and both categories added to the MK2 drill, where the original only has basic ores.

Unfortunately this already got a dev response and they decided that it is not worth looking into

[Aeternus]

Alternative suggestion (lookin' at you Bobs ): Electric miners that can handle 1x1 tile, so that you can nibble the edges of a field easily without needing to worry about overlap. The issue with the large mining stations is the big square coverage area - narrow that down and it should be possible to quickly mine out the edges of a field. A single tile cannot hold 2 resource types after all.
A "Small Electric Mine" would solve that issue.

[Tekky]

I am, in principle, against the original poster's suggestion.

However, I consider the issue described by bobingabout regarding uranium ore to be serious and agree that it requires some solution. For example, if a miner has no access to sulfuric acid, it should not stall, but instead it should continue to mine non-uranium ore.

[plepper1]

In the cases where I can correctly place the electric miners, I get around this just by using a burner miner. It only mines what it's actually sitting on so allows a much more surgical mining footprint.