How do YOU use mining drills?

[mmmPI]

Space exploration is one of those mod where there exist sources of infinite ore. I built all my solar from those Not sure if it waste uranium or not, the main reasonning for using the infinite ore to build solar was to avoid having to replace mining drills.

Beacons also works differently in space exploration, as you can't place them next to each other, and i think nor can they enhance the same entity, or an entity be enhanced by 2 beacons , it hardly compare with vanilla, there's also twice as many tiers of modules each beacon can host a lot more and have a wider area to compensate for the removed stacking.

[mrvn]

Let's focus on this for a minute. Wether you do mining productivity reasearch or not doesn't change the extra ore you get from the productivity modules. Similar wether you use productivity modules or not doesn't change the extra ore you get from productivity research. In both cases each module and each research will give you an extra 10% ore.

Except that when you've got mining prod research giving you +300% productivity, each Prod module only gives you 2.5% more ore than you'd get without it, not 10%.

Because the percentages are additive, not multiplicative..

And if you have 1000000000000000% productivity each productivity research gives you 0% more ore. So you should never look at the cost of productivity research, it's never worth it since you get 0% more ore.

Or what is your argument?


The number 10% above isn't 10% of the total ore delivered but 10% of the ore removed from the ore patch. Every 10 ores removed you get one for free. And that number doesn't change no matter how much productivity research or productivity modules you already have. Each increase in modules or research gives you 1 extra ore for every 10 ores removed from the ore patch.

[mmmPI]

Except that when you've got mining prod research giving you +300% productivity, each Prod module only gives you 2.5% more ore than you'd get without it, not 10%.
Because the percentages are additive, not multiplicative..

The number 10% above isn't 10% of the total ore delivered but 10% of the ore removed from the ore patch. Every 10 ores removed you get one for free. And that number doesn't change no matter how much productivity research or productivity modules you already have. Each increase in modules or research gives you 1 extra ore for every 10 ores removed from the ore patch.

You are both correct, the percentages are additive, and indeed it doesn't change the rate at which you deplete ressources from the ore patch. I know this discussion comes back from time to time, i could find the previous time i made some math for this :
viewtopic.php?p=575685

Rule of thumb => with 1 billion ore, you can research around up to mining productivity 198 199 or so before the ore is depleted.
Or in other word, barely anyone need more than a billion ore. 20 ore patch of 30 million each is a LOT already

[GregoriusT]

and indeed it doesn't change the rate at which you deplete resources from the ore patch.

Clarification to avoid misunderstandings: its the rate per unit of time that is meant here (if you can handle the amount), you definitely get more ore out of it in total, otherwise it would be a Mining Speed Research instead.

Also in 2.0 the depletion rate is bound to the quality of the drill, this means you actually get a lot more out of a patch and might only need half the amount of total ore, or have double the time, unsure how exactly its calculated, i know it is not calculated the insanely OP way, that is for sure.

[mmmPI]

and indeed it doesn't change the rate at which you deplete resources from the ore patch.

Clarification to avoid misunderstandings: its the rate per unit of time that is meant here (if you can handle the amount), you definitely get more ore out of it in total, otherwise it would be a Mining Speed Research instead.

Exactly ! i meant that if you have a mining drill that remove 1 ore per second, it wil always remove 1 ore per second, except if you add speed modules or beacons, the research or productivity module makes it so that this 1 removed ore is instead 1.1 or 1.2 or 10 or 50 if you have 1 or 2 or much level of productivity but there is a fixed "removal rate".

Also in 2.0 the depletion rate is bound to the quality of the drill, this means you actually get a lot more out of a patch and might only need half the amount of total ore, or have double the time, unsure how exactly its calculated, i know it is not calculated the insanely OP way, that is for sure.

I don't know either for the calculation but my first guess for further inference would be : the way it works is to reduce the % of occurences that this 1 ore per second would actually be removed from the patch. So if you have thanks to the quality of the drill "50%" , it means the mining drill would "miss" the removal of the ore 50% of time. if you only have 30 % , then 70% of the time the 1 ore per second is remove, but 30 of time, it's not and thus making the ore patch last longer by that amount.

I think also other than the quality of the drill, the regular mining drill and big mining drill may have different "rate of removal" for lack of better wording. Is that the OP way for your ? To me it is OP and i hope/think it will be like this.

[GregoriusT]

I don't know either for the calculation but my first guess for further inference would be : the way it works is to reduce the % of occurences that this 1 ore per second would actually be removed from the patch. So if you have thanks to the quality of the drill "50%" , it means the mining drill would "miss" the removal of the ore 50% of time. if you only have 30 % , then 70% of the time the 1 ore per second is remove, but 30 of time, it's not and thus making the ore patch last longer by that amount.

Yeah it is not the way you described, because the devs already confirmed elsewhere that "50%" does not mean half the ore is dug up, which would be absurdly OP combined with a legendary big drill, which already has a 50% base on that. So we are not getting "Paradox 4X Game Percentages", where 100% means you do not use up ANY ore, and 110% means you INCREASE the ore patch richness somehow.

What I assume will be the case is that its a second productivity bar, which the miner then uses to materialize an ore out of nowhere instead of harvesting it. This would make 100% effectively half the ores are used up, 200% is then a third is used, etc etc.

[mmmPI]

Yeah it is not the way you described, because the devs already confirmed elsewhere that "50%" does not mean half the ore is dug up, which would be absurdly OP combined with a legendary big drill, which already has a 50% base on that. So we are not getting "Paradox 4X Game Percentages", where 100% means you do not use up ANY ore, and 110% means you INCREASE the ore patch richness somehow.

What I assume will be the case is that its a second productivity bar, which the miner then uses to materialize an ore out of nowhere instead of harvesting it. This would make 100% effectively half the ores are used up, 200% is then a third is used, etc etc.

What you describe for the way ore materialize out of nowhere instead of being harvested makes sense if it's not the most OP solution, i didn't know that devs said it wasn't the case for 50%=> 1/2 of ore dig up. I thought with 5 level of quality for the drill you could still get a cap without going past 100% 50% for Q1 60%Q2 70%Q3 80%Q4 90%Q5(legendary).

But do we really need a cap ? I don't mind increasing the richness of the ore patch by magic drill reinjecting iron x). Aren't we given infinite ore with lava anyway ? If you extract the lava and recycle the iron over and over ? To me it needs to go somewhere, I think it wouldn't be silly that this or asteroids could be used to regrow an iron patch. Or maybe it would be silly but in a fun way. You could detect when ore patch run dry and automate spaceplatform navigation to catch some rare asteroids that could be rerouted to crash in certain location with circuits or something, until you unlock enough technology to have the drills that can regrow the ore patch natively, so you wouldn't need to remove drills before the asteroids collision anymore instead the challenge of automation would be to controll which of the >1 and <1 drills are active so the iron patch doesn't run dry, but also doesn't overflow and cause some problems like lightning strike, but coming from the underground.

Again what you say sounds way more likely, but in case as it's sill unconfirmed, i'd like to keep a wide range of possibilities in consideration.

[FasterJump]

[...]the devs already confirmed elsewhere that "50%" does not mean half the ore is dug up[...]

The sources I found doesn't match what you're saying. I agree with mmmPI, I think that 50% resource drain reduction means that half the ore is deducted from the ore patch. 16.67% ressource drain reduction with 4 Legendary productivity modules(+100% productivity bonus, see FFF-375) means that a 10k ore patch yield 120k ore. Now say you have mining productivity research level 10, each miner will have +200% productivity, a 10k ore patch yield 180k ore.

Note: You also need a lot of solar cells to produce all that extra power for the modules. And the space to place solar cells. Has anyone calculated the amount of ore needed for the solar cells? Could be even more than the modules.

Assuming that each beacon and miner consumes 900 kW, it means that you need 15 solar panel per mining set to power the mining outpost (drill + beacon + 5 T3 modules). 15 solar panels costs 600 ore (with T3 prod modules in prod chain). It is not very significant compared to the 5,523 ores needed to make 5 T3 modules (by the way, 1 beacon costs 115 ores to build). Realistically, you would use nuclear power, so it could cost even less.

At the end of the day, a 200 SPM base (counting science produced, not converted into research that has a +20% bonus with modules in labs) consumes 24'000 ore per minute (counting only iron and copper). In a base with mining productivity research level 4, each beaconed drill would produces 0.5 * (1+0.3+0.4) * (1 + 0.7 - 0.45) = 1.0625 ore per second, 63.75 ore per minute. 24'000 / 63.75 = 376 mining drill.

Conclusion: considering a 200 SPM base with mining productivity research level 4, this is very close to the breaking point: researching mining productivity level 5 cost slightly more than the cost of upgrading outposts to beaconed setups (cost of making 376 sets of 5 T3 modules (+ 1 beacon + 15 solar panels per set)).

With the expansion coming this year, it will be possible to use the new "Big Mining Drill" (mining area of 13x13 tiles, (+4 tiles from the drill edge)) with beacons and still cover all of the ore patch tiles. The main drawback of using beaconed mining outpost currently is that it has to be dismantled and rebuilt so that all the ore can be extracted from the ore patch. This inconvenience will be no more with the big mining drill. Also, because the big mining drill is twice faster, adding modules to mining outposts will require twice less modules.

[GregoriusT]

Again what you say sounds way more likely, but in case as it's sill unconfirmed, i'd like to keep a wide range of possibilities in consideration.

What I meant was it is not going to be "minus X %" in the maths, especially since Legendary is 150% and that would result in negative ore consumption. I know the Devs confirmed that somewhere, and they also said how the Maths go for this, but I honestly do not understand the exact maths of it, so I will refrain from talking about the exact maths myself, just to then continue speculating in the first spoiler. XD

warning i was wrong with this speculation

One example I THINK was mentioned that the 50% of the big drill and the 150% of legendary quality will add up into 200%, which in turn means that only one third of the Ores gets consumed a la "100% / (100% + 200%)", but I am really not sure if that REALLY is the maths behind it.

This Maths also means that the earlygame 30% and 60% Qualities on Mining Drills will have much less of an Effect and result in -25% and -37.5% for normal Mining Drills.

90% will make it go down to almost half, and 150% will result in -60%, which in turn are much more reasonable numbers.

minor rant though i think its a major thing

Though I really hope they reconsider calling it "percentages" in the case of Miners, because damn that will be just as confusing as the absolute bleepfest that is the Map Mouseover of Oil Patches to this day, where you cant see in the mouseover how many oil spots there are, and instead are presented with a vague percentage (which will divide itself by 5 over time, except for super dee duper special cases!) and the prospect of manually counting the oil puddles by hand for no damn reason other than knowing how many Pumpjacks you will need...

[FasterJump]

I don't understand where your "90%" and "150%" numbers comes from. Do you have a source?

Legendary quality a Big mining drill only drains the resource 17% of the time

I believe that resource drain % and productivity % are not additive.

[GregoriusT]

I don't understand where your "90%" and "150%" numbers comes from. Do you have a source?

Legendary quality a Big mining drill only drains the resource 17% of the time

the original FFF which had a general description of which percentages are being applied to EVERYTHING, and as i said very specifically it was speculation because I did not properly understand the math that i saw quoted in the swimming in lava fff thread somewhere i think.

And now that you reminded me that what was said is 17% which might actually be 16.66666% rounded up, that means my speculative maths are probably correct, though there was a factor of 2 in the maths that i was missing. Wait no, that would result in 20% if the factor of 2 was applied correctly... Yeah no, I am glad I have put that into a speculation spoiler earlier, because I really done screwed up there.

As for the rant, as long as the percentage displayed in the tooltip is the correct one it will be fine for the Miner.

I still hate the way the Map View handles the Oil Patch mouseover though.

[mmmPI]

And now that you reminded me that what was said is 17% which might actually be 16.66666% rounded up

I don't know what to think anymore, i remember that too now from earlier FFF about quality. But i can't find any rationnal for 50%=> 17% of cycle consuming ore , for the first and last quality level, how to spread other value in between so that "legendary" is 150% of "normal" in a certain way. Can't find that particular way , and i suppose there could still be tweaks made by the devs between now an release so that is a lot of speculation, which i don't mind, even though the question was 'how you do the mining drill? ' "i do math and speculation month before as preparation" is a valid answer to me, that's a bit extreme, but it doesn't come as chock to me either to see (other) players over-engineer things

Also i disagree, you didn't screwed up, you help refined understanding and dispell rumors, i had no idea at all because it seem i had forgotten or misread the FFF or had my own speculation stick more in memory. Then i thought it could be 90%, then i thought i wouldn't be that, now i have that 17% well in mind

Conclusion: considering a 200 SPM base with mining productivity research level 4, this is very close to the breaking point: researching mining productivity level 5 cost slightly more than the cost of upgrading outposts to beaconed setups (cost of making 376 sets of 5 T3 modules (+ 1 beacon + 15 solar panels per set)).

I like the wording on this one, "cost slightly more". Doesn't mean one is "better" or the other. The "cost in ressources" being one thing to measure but not the only one. I mean if you consider that 200 SPM base, and a player who rather go for modules everywhere rather than research from 4 to 5 because it cost more ressources. Then player is left with 200 moduled mining drill and still research lvl 4.

From that situation, the question (to me) is no longer between more module and the research, from my point of view, but rather : if i want to improve my mining drill area/ ressource income, i need to have enough modules in reserve now, otherwise the module i've already paid for will see their share of ressources "bonified" dimishing when adding new mining drill. Because that could create a situation where only 95% of drills have modules, or 90% or 85% and so on, it creates limit in the potential expansion rate, that if player try to expand faster than this limit,(module production rate) it will be more and more "ineficient".

Whereas if you have paid "slightly more" for the research, it makes every single additionnal mining drill that player wish to build as good as any other previous mining drill. Sure you have paid slightly more before, but now if you place 50 or 100 or 1000 new drills because your next step in the game plan involve a large scaling there is less downside, you don't need to wait for the modules to be in chest expansion is cheap.

The second option to me leave the player in a much better position, even if when considering the strict productivity of the infrastructure whose cost was factored in is "slightly higher". In an other game it could be stated as : policy (A) pay [27] for a +3 bonus on all your [existing mining drills] vs policy (B) pay [28] for a +3 bonus on all your [existing] and [future] mining drill. The [27] vs [28} breaking point is one thing. But it's only the cost of the operation, there is also a second bracket that matter, policy (B) cost the same as policy or slightly more than policy (A) , the immediate result are measured to be the same "+3" , true, but in situation (B) you are then free to allocate your module to green circuit or red circuit, or blue circuit or more module production, whatever, while expanding your mining drills "cheaply". Whereas if one decided to go for the slightly less expensive policy (A) what is the optimal allocation for new module and/or mining drill now ? Either adding mining drills, and the proportion of all the modules that goes there is "missing" for the rest of the factory compared to situation (B), or waiting for the next research like situation (B) but WITHOUT possibility to expand the mining drill number efficiently if not sinking all new module there.

Not sure how one would go about mathing those effect without making first lot of assumption/speculation about the price of things that are vey subjective such as how to model the "worse" outcome of situation (A) compared to (B) in terms of 'margin of action'. That's not something you measure in ore objectively or i wouldn't know how to put a meaningful number here, but i think it's important to keep in mind the meaning of the result and be precise in the wording delivering them and i think it was well done imo, and i appreciate it. Thank you ! : )

I still hate the way the Map View handles the Oil Patch mouseover though.

Suggestion : ([number of pumpjackslot],[ total yield %]) 2 numbers displayed, in case you have 27 pumpjack slots, and you can't be bothered to count them but you also don't want to bring several stacks to make sure you have enough when you go there ? ^^

I know sometimes percentages over 100 are used wrongly and it's irritating, but sometimes there is reason to use % above 100 too ! When there is growth, one can say there was "5%" growth this year, or this year results are 105% those of last year. They could have been 50% 70% 90% 150% 200% 900%. To me when you read "1609 %" yield, i consider it's 16 times worth of the "base" pumpjack, that would be a 100% yield,(10 crude per second written when hovering a single pumpjack ) so 200% yield for a ore patch, means 2 pumpjack slot, with 100% yield each or maybe it is 4 with only 50% yield each. Then when you count the dots on the map, you could know the average yield of pumpjack there but you can also see that if you have 602% yield and you know you placed 12 pumpjacks there, then they must have roughly 50% or so on average.

How much oil that represent ? heeee that's difficult to know because it would depend on mining productivity and pumpjack blueprint. Yield though, is the same wether the oupost is powered or not, wether there is prod mining or not, which then allow to compare pumpjacks from map view in the same way as ore patch. ( not the iron/ second, only the "quantity left" which is infinite for oil... so it needs a particular method of representation that may never really be as intuitive as clicking a pumpjack and seeing its production graph overtime could do).

Adding the number of dots to the yield when hovering would be work for you ? Then people gonna ask for the surface of the ore patch in tile, to know how many mining drill can fit, and the average density of the ore patch and so on. I didn't even know you could wire pump jacks with circuits, i never used before testing for this particular discussion. It can "show ressources", and if the yield is 399%, this means 39.9 crude per second, and the circuit show 39, but if you add or remove beacons and modules it doesn't change that value not even in the circuit. The actual number of dots in such case doesnt matter right ? in my test i only had 1 pumpjack, but it could have been 2 or 3 or 10 for that 399% yield, you would still know how much "base oil per second" the experiment oupost is able to produce. In actual game to me the number of dots is useful "once" or "twice" when you go there first, or maybe a second time to add modules and beacons you didn't have access too earlier , whereas the yield is more of a 2 digit or 3 digit or 4 digit question. "depleted" "well taped" "good reserve" I don't go into fancy math in game as much as i do in the forum just to get rules of thumbs, i try to avoid using spreadsheet when playing although some alt tabbing is sometimes necesary i hope it will be less with the future combinators but i'm not sure how it could happen for the yield of pumpjacks to make more sense for intuition, apart from adding the number of dots.

[GregoriusT]

Those 17% are basically multiplying Ore Patches by six in the absolute best case then. Though you need to be in a really limited scenario or map settings to actually need that much savings. Still fun to have both Productivity and Resource Savings as modifiers on Mining Drills now, Ore Patches are gonna be practically infinite in the endgame, even if they aren't far away. (though you can always build as many space scrubbers as needed for infinite iron, copper and other meteorites, lol)

more freedom juice debate

Okay on the Oil Jack thing I have to mention, number of Dots is actually useful because you can divide the yield by the amount of jacks to find out out much oil you are going to get from it in the long term. With far away oil spots you would not need that because there you can just divide the total by five and be done with it

But with the closeby ones there is the super dee duper special dee case, where a pump spot will NOT divide itself by five and instead stop at exactly 20% yield, which is the case for all individual spots that start off below 100% yield. So if you take total yield and see that the amount of oil spots multiplied by 100 is higher than the total yield, you know you will get more oil out of it in the long term, since it will not divide the oil spots by 5 and instead will have them go to 20% each spot because 20% is the absolute depletion cap.

But I guess my entire point is rendered moot the moment you surround the Jacks with Beacons, which good frikkin luck calculating THAT considering sometimes a Pumpjack or two are in the way of the Beacon placement (except with Space Exploration Beacons, those are so much better).

[mmmPI]

I think it opens up a new ressources sink than the research to consider going for legendary big mining drill filled with legendary module surrounded by legendary beacons of legendary speed. Would you invest 100 M ore in research or in higher quality drills ? given the choice.Which one is the "most efficient" ? It's not so easy to put prices on things then. Even if you don't do it because you feel like you "need" the ressources, but more to give a purpose to the factory. ( is 200 SPM a bigger factory than a factory designed to produce 10 legendary mining drill and their modules and their beacons every hour ? every 10 minutes ? ) And then when going for a longer game, would you first go toward a 200 SPM factory, or keep it lower like 50-60 SPM and instead sink more % of ressources toward increased quality over research ? Sure ressources are "infinite" but allocation is still a difficult question

I thought about legendary pumpjacks too, but that's whole other topic. I didn't know those around starting location did not deplete as much as the others.

[GregoriusT]

I thought about legendary pumpjacks too, but that's whole other topic. I didn't know those around starting location did not deplete as much as the others.

Well the Pumpjacks are kindof like Mining Drills, unsure how they behave when upgraded. There is Mods that add Infinite Ores which have a slowly depleting yield percentage like Oil Spots. How would the Quality Drills react to that even? Deplete it slower? Sure, but once it's at either a fifth of its original maximum or at 20% it will stop depleting and you will no longer need the Drills or Pumpjacks to be Quality. There should be some tangible benefit of using the slower Resource depletion rate on infinite Ores.

[mrvn]

I thought about legendary pumpjacks too, but that's whole other topic. I didn't know those around starting location did not deplete as much as the others.

Well the Pumpjacks are kindof like Mining Drills, unsure how they behave when upgraded. There is Mods that add Infinite Ores which have a slowly depleting yield percentage like Oil Spots. How would the Quality Drills react to that even? Deplete it slower? Sure, but once it's at either a fifth of its original maximum or at 20% it will stop depleting and you will no longer need the Drills or Pumpjacks to be Quality. There should be some tangible benefit of using the slower Resource depletion rate on infinite Ores.

Quality pumpjacks definetly should pump more. It would be disappointing if they only gave a benefit at the start of pumping oil and then loose all their benefits.

[Qatavin]

I build mines with longevity in mind. Mining drills placed densely in the richer areas, and with more space between them in the sparser areas. Belt lines start in the denser center of a patch and branch outwards, though usually in only two directions, for the sake of time. This means the dense parts of the patch are mined first when demand is low.

I even modded in modules that slow machines down, and I usually use them in my mines. Deliberating lessening the mine's output might seem like a shocking thing to do, but the point is to smooth out the production, so that it becomes more stable across the mine's entire lifetime.