As title says. With Exotic Space Industries ( https://mods.factorio.com/mod/exotic-space-industries ), the surface drill becomes a crafting machine, and thus you cannot make interfaces to the subsurfaces.

Not sure if you can fix it on your end (already raised a bug report on ESI) but I really want to use both mods so I'm shooting my shot

Unfo I cant test because I do not own the DLC. I scraped the code of the ESI but couldnt find any hints about changed mining drills. Can you send test again with only ESI (and dependency mods) and Subsurface?

Absolutely, what logs/data do you want?

Disable all mods except ESI, it's dependencies and Subsurface. Then tell me which mods affects the surface drill (hovering it)

Interesting - with only those mods, it's back to working like a drill...

I'll keep checking, previously it had disabled with ESI, will report back if any of the optional dependencies cause this issue.

Edit: Tried to load back my main save with this and now it seems to hang the save at consistency check... strange.

Consider this a non-issue until I get my situation sorted out.

Found the problem!

Turns out, somehow, that while the problem goes away after uninstalling EI, it's CREATED by Quantum Fabricator: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/quantum-fabricator

Something about the way it places structures doesn't vibe with the methods you're using to make the entity.

I remember reporting a similar problem to the devs of Heat Pumps, whom somehow found a way to fix it? https://mods.factorio.com/user/MrLumme

Either way, hand-placing the structure works.

I'll add a fix for that