These guys mine for you, based from their mining depot.
Old demonstration video: https://streamable.com/ymk8h
You can mine any ore including modded ones and Uranium, by inputting the required fluid into the depot. The mining area is shown when hovering over a depot, it is a 80x80 area in front of the depot.
Math
Ore mining rate is about 30 per drone per minute, if ore patch is nearby depot. By default, it's up to 100 drones in a depot, so totally 3000 ore pcs per depot per minute. You will have lower rate if ore patch is farther (which will happen naturally due to its exhaustion) and higher rate if you research mining productivity or drones speed technologies.
v2.0 Features
1. Technology
You need to research a technology to unlock Drones and Depots.
2. Editable drones recipe
Drones recipe is customasable by startup settings. There are the following optional ingredients:
- iron stick and gear wheels
- steel plates
- green / red / blue circuits
- heat / electric engine
- battery
- more ingredients from supported overhaul mods!
Some of these will also affect depot's recipe. The cost of science packs and required dependencies of root technology will be updated with startup settings you pick. So, you can make Mining Drones an early-, mid- or late-game technology.
3. Pollution
Mining drones produce pollution in accrodance with vanilla drills. The amount can be adjusted by map settings, whether you prefer more or less pollution.
4. Energy
Drones consume electric energy to perform work, so you need to attach a power pole. Default value of required energy usage by a drone is 100 kW, it can be edited with settings, down to 0. Note that depot also consumes energy as 5 drones to maintain their management.
5. Depot capacity
Configurable number of drones in a depot, default capacity is 100, but you can set 10-2000. Other forks have a bug of ore deletion when there are too many drons, it's solved here.
Also you can change drones' item stack size from 20 to 5-500.
6. Drones utlise vanilla Mining Productivity research
I removed additional Productivity research for mining drones, now vanilla one is used. This can be reverted by settings.
7. Disableable Drills
Also you can disable Burner or Electric Mining Drills to live with drones only!
8. Ore Auto Loading
If you accidentally grab ore from a depot, it will be put back when you open it :)
9. Migrating from v1.x and forks
I spent several hours to burn my brain, but made migration process from original Mining Drones mod and its forks as smooth and seamless as possible, recreating state management objects and cleaning all the hidden entities to prevent wandering drones, collision with invisible walls and overlapping text labels.
10. Mods compatibility
Supported & compatible mods:
- AAI Industry – additional recipe settings for big/small burner/electric motors/engines.
- Space Exploration – new ores & additional settings.
- Tiberian Dawn – new ores & auto rescan on their growth.
- Warptorio2 – everything keeps working after warp teleportations; drones benefit from W2 productivity research.
- Warp Driving Machine – in progress, waiting for integration support from their side. Feel free to write smth there to motivate the developers!
- Deep core mining, Prospector – ignoring their special resources to keep depot's menu clean.
- and many more by default! Any new ore is already supported.
In case you use a mod that performs some complex logic that breaks ore detection by depots (like teleportation or ore growth), you can use manual commands /mining-depots-rescan or more cruel /mining-depots-total-reset
Skin mods:
- C&C, Red Alert, Tiberium Dawn – replaces depot and miners with refinery and harvesters from the legendary game series. Note that harvesters for Uranium and Tiberium look differently than harvesters of other ores!
- AAI Mining Vehicle
- Also, as character sprite is used for the mining drones, most of the character skin mods also affect the way mining drones look.
Locales
The following languages are supported:
- English 🇬🇧
- German / Deutsch 🇩🇪
- Spanish / Español 🇪🇸
- French / Français 🇫🇷
- Turkish / Türkçe 🇹🇷
- Ukrainian / Український 🇺🇦
- Russian / Русский 🇷🇺
- Chinese / 中文 🇨🇳
Final notes
Hope you will love this mod 😊 Bug reports are welcome, feature and compatibility requests may be also considered. You can write in mod's Discussions or in Discord.
The mod is based on amazing Mining Drones by Klonan, it got lots of forks each of which separately adds one of some features listed above, but I disliked these imperfections, decided to deeply immerse into the code to create the most comprehensive version of original mod providing great balance and many improvements. There was an interesting discussion on Reddit.
Partially it's similar to my previous mod Mining Drones improved Tech which was a separate patch with recipe change only, while this one is a fork due to it allowed much more improvements.
For other modders: my goal is to MD2R maximally extensible and compatible. Check out related FAQ section.
Marketing
- To protect and expand your factory, I recommend to use: Extended Laser Turrets for defense and Improved Sniper Rifle and Carbine for offense.
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- To make hunting more fun and profitable, or to have an additional crude oil supply, check out Powered by Biters.
- A new type of green energy is available: ThunderStorm Lightnings, it also provides fancy thunder artillery.
- In case you'd like to try a different scientific approach, have a look at Reverse Engineering Lab.
Support
Making and maintaining good mods is a hard work actually. If you like my mods, you can tip me here: