I want to mine the iron! Stop trying to mine the uranium!

[ItsTheKais]

So, this is really obnoxious:


I need to mine the iron ore, but the mining drill only wants to be in fluid-assisted mode because there's some uranium ore under it. Now, in this particular spot, I could place the drill a few tiles to the right and it would work, but it's not always that simple.

There doesn't seem to be a way to switch mining modes, so... I have a feature request?

[Lav]

As far as I know, this works as intended. If you put a mine on two or more resource patches, you'll need to split the output with filter inserters and then merge the results into your normal mining outputs.

[ItsTheKais]

It would be one thing if it actually worked like that. The fluid-assisted miner only mines uranium, though. It won't even power on if it doesn't have sulfuric.

[Koub]

I guess depending on the ressources in its mining area, and the presence or absence of sulfuric acid, the mining drills could choose to mine only what they can. It indeed seems impractical to need to empty first all the uranium with sulfuric acid to then be able to mine the iron that was next to it.

[Kelderek]

If the line between the two ores is straight enough, you can move your miners so that there is no overlap. The picture you show looks fairly easy to fix, but other areas may be harder to work around.

[Koub]

I think such a situation should not need a workaround, but a solution. Like when you buy a jacket with two different sized sleeves, the answer should not be "if you bend a little so that this arm sticks out and not the other, you fit perfectly the jacket", but "ok let's fit the jacket to its wearer".

[Optera]

I always wanted to have filters on miners so they only dig what i tell them to.
Probably would make things too easy though.

[Frightning]

Definitely seems like a bit of an oversight. With regular ores, the solution was always to have a pair of Filter inserters split the outputs into their appropriate belts (I would run a belt along the miners on the boundary, and then at the end of it, Filter the ores onto separate belts that joined the appropriate outgoing belt back to my base; if there were lots of boundary miners, I might even use Stack filter inserters for the task for throughput reasons).

[Selvek]

Am I the only one who thinks that uranium miners should be a totally separate thing than normal miners? That (1) solves OP's problem, (2) eliminates this single case in all of factorio where placement of an object totally changes its graphics and operation, and (3) opens the door for having uranium miners cost a bit more to match their higher level of tech.

[Nemoricus]

Am I the only one who thinks that uranium miners should be a totally separate thing than normal miners? That (1) solves OP's problem, (2) eliminates this single case in all of factorio where placement of an object totally changes its graphics and operation, and (3) opens the door for having uranium miners cost a bit more to match their higher level of tech.

It's somewhat comparable to assemblers changing when working with fluid-based recipes. Though, personally, I don't think that's particularly ideal from an ease-of-understanding perspective. Dedicated uranium and fluid handling would be preferable.

[Selvek]

Am I the only one who thinks that uranium miners should be a totally separate thing than normal miners? That (1) solves OP's problem, (2) eliminates this single case in all of factorio where placement of an object totally changes its graphics and operation, and (3) opens the door for having uranium miners cost a bit more to match their higher level of tech.

It's somewhat comparable to assemblers changing when working with fluid-based recipes. Though, personally, I don't think that's particularly ideal from an ease-of-understanding perspective. Dedicated uranium and fluid handling would be preferable.

Yeah, assemblers change slightly with the recipe, but miners 1) change graphics completely, and 2) change based on location only, not a player-selectable option.

Since you're on the subject of assemblers... it took me roughly 2 full playthroughs to realize that you can rotate buildings that have already been placed. And assemblers don't have an orientation until you give them a recipe that needs a fluid. So, I spent two games thinking that the only way to have an assembler with a fluid recipe in any orientation other than input to the north was through blueprints...