Deep miner and automatic mining

At some point collecting ore by hand gets tedious. The Deep Miner stays in one place, drills into the ground and keeps putting out ore. All you need to do is power it and have the ore taken away.

At a glance#

The key numbers: 500 W base draw, one export slot, one chute output, separate ports for power and data. The device sits on the large 2 m grid and is about 7 m tall – plan for the height if you put it inside a hall.

What it delivers#

At full speed the deep miner produces 10 or 11 pieces of Dirty Ore every 100 to 119 s. The game data says 10 to 12 pieces and 100 to 120 s, but the game only rolls up to one below the upper limit. That is a little over 5 to 6.6 pieces per minute, on average one piece every 10.4 s.

Now add the power. The game calculates in ticks of 0.5 s, and the 500 W are 500 J per tick, i.e. 1,000 J per second. Over about 110 s that makes 110,000 J for 10.5 pieces, so roughly 10,400 J per piece. A fully charged Station Battery with 3,600,000 J runs it for 3,600,000 / 500 = 7,200 ticks, which is one hour.

Drill first, then produce#

After switching on, the motor spins up by 1.5 RPM per tick to 200 RPM – that takes about 67 s. Then the drill head sinks at 0.125 m per second down to bedrock at height 0. If the miner stands 40 m above bedrock, that is 320 s before the first ore arrives. Ore veins it drills through on the way are gone afterwards without releasing any ore. If a structure is in the drill path, it stops with an error. The info display on the device shows the distance to bedrock and the progress towards the next stack.

What is in the ore#

Dirty ore is a mixture. What it contains is set by one of eleven deep mining profiles. Every world with an ore profile knows the same eleven:

Which profile applies is decided by the location. Every world has a map of deep mining regions, and every region belongs to exactly one profile. The miner checks which region it stands in when it is placed and when the game loads, and keeps that profile. Its info display names the mix as soon as it has power. The maps cover every world without gaps, but not evenly. Share of each profile on the region map in per cent:

On the Moon, cobalt from the deep miner is therefore a rarity, while on Europa it covers a tenth of the map. If the profile is wrong, only a different location helps.

Setting it up#

The kit Kit (Deep Miner) is made in a tier 2 Autolathe: steel 50, invar 10, electrum 5, constantan 5, 180 s, 72,000 J. So you first need the Autolathe Printer Mod in the autolathe – and for that an upgraded electronics printer. How these tiers fit together is explained in Manufacturing: which machine prints what.

It is built in four stages:

When you place it, the game checks the ground: in the 2 m cell the miner stands in, at most 6,000 of the 8,000 litres may be free. So at least a quarter of the cell has to be terrain. It does not work on a platform high above the ground.

Passing the ore on#

You cannot empty the export slot by hand. Always connect a chute to the output. Without a chute the game drops the ore on the ground in front of the hatch, where it quickly piles up.

The usual chain looks like this:

1. deep miner → chute
2. chute → Centrifuge: according to the recipe data it turns every substance back into the matching ore, for example iron into Ore (Iron) and hydrocarbon into Ore (Coal).
3. centrifuge → chute → furnace or Arc Furnace

By the numbers, a profile with iron 1 gives one iron ore per piece of dirty ore. With the cobalt profile at 0.1 you need ten pieces for one cobalt ore.

Plan the centrifuge generously: at full speed it needs 18 s per piece of dirty ore, but the deep miner delivers one every 10.4 s. One centrifuge therefore manages only a little over half – one miner needs two. And never send dirty ore straight into a furnace: it vanishes there without giving off anything.

Controlling it with IC10#

The deep miner knows On, Setting, Ratio, Maximum, ExportCount and the usual power values. Setting (0 to 100) and the Ratio derived from it have no effect on the electric deep miner – it is only switched via On. Since it draws a lot of power, load shedding pays off: it should only run while the battery is well charged. Keep in mind that it has to spin up again after every switch-on.

# Deep miner only on a charged battery
define MINER 265720906         # Deep Miner (StructureDeepMiner)
define BATTERY -400115994      # Station Battery (StructureBattery)
define NMINER HASH("Deep Miner")     # name of the miner
define NBATT HASH("Battery Mining")  # name of the battery
define HIGH 0.5                # switch on from 50 % charge
define LOW 0.2                 # switch off below 20 %
alias charge r0
alias maximum r1
alias ratio r2
alias run r3
alias tmp r4

start:
yield
lbn charge BATTERY NBATT Charge 0
bnan charge start              # no battery with this name
lbn maximum BATTERY NBATT Maximum 0
bnan maximum start
blez maximum start             # never divide by 0
div ratio charge maximum
sgt tmp ratio HIGH
select run tmp 1 run           # enough charge: switch on
slt tmp ratio LOW
select run tmp 0 run           # too little: switch off
sbn MINER NMINER On run
j start

Between 20 and 50 % the last state is kept. This hysteresis stops the miner from switching on and off all the time. More on that in the academy under hysteresis.

Other automatic miners#

For the tablet there is also the Cartridge (Deep Miner) from the electronics printer.

Common mistakes#

• Cannot be placed: not enough terrain in the cell. Set it deeper into the ground.
• Ore lies on the ground: no chute at the output.
• Runs but delivers nothing: it is still drilling down to bedrock – the info display shows the distance. If it only shows an error, a structure is in the drill path.
• Wrong ore: the profile depends on the location. Build the miner in a different region.
• Everything else goes off: 500 W is a lot for a small grid. Recheck the balance, see Power grid basics.

Further reading#

• Ores, contents and gases: Ores and what they contain
• Separating dirty ore: Recycling and centrifuge: getting material back
• Mining by hand: Mining: finding and extracting ore
• Check the power demand: Power calculator