On T1 this monstrosity outshines all the immobile alternatives of the same tier by so much it's not even funny.

On my particular setup it gave the output 15 times that of burner drill with only about 2 times the coal consumption of one. (RSO + bob's + angel's + prospector + boatload of other mods but none of them mess with ores or mining AFAIK; tested on both saphirite and stiratite)

On top of that it has increased durability and it's own large storage.

And you start with one free sample.

I do like some of those perks (specifically durability and storage), and my current game setup is probably too tough for conventional mining to handle anyway (getting swarmed more or less from the start), but this is still wrong.

It's supposed to be an automated mobile miner yet there's practically nothing that immobile miners have over it.

IMHO it should not mine faster (nor should it have more mining power) than a drill of the same tier.

Were you trying to make that thing break the balance?

If it's supposed to be built at the same time as burner drills it isn't supposed to outshine burner drills.

Tone it down to the output (and the total fuel consumption) of 3-4 burner drills. More than that and we would never ever want to place burner drills again.
Keep the cost ABOVE that of 3-4 burner drills, since they still have improved durability and large internal storage, not to mention the potential for vehicle-based automation.

I like the idea of being able to get an ore field mined with a "harvester" instead of covering it in drills all the time, but that kind of mining shouldn't outshine the conventional mining in anything but (paid) convenience.

TBH I don't even think that this mod needs an early tier miner that should appear in the times of burner drills. Personally I'd place it somewhere close to rail roads in terms of availability. In other words IMHO it's a method for mining EXTRA ore fields, and not for initial deposits.

well thats how u feel but then there are people like me who like it this way

I agree that the balance is way off. The cost, mining speed, and free vehicle make no sense. They should all be more complex, more expensive, and mine a lot slower than this.

There will be a balance patch later that will affect the cost and performance of all the AAI vehicles and structures along with some additional tech requirements. The miner will have reduced mining speed but it will still be a lot more than a single miner of any given tier since it takes multiple mining structures to build and it is not practical to put as many vehicles on an ore deposit as mining structures because they would crash into each other.

Can you simply make a config file with the different characteristics so we can balance it ourselves? In my opinion there should only be one miner, very expensive, that mines just as fast as a normal electric miner. The fact that it's automated alone makes it superior.

Edit: Or just tell me where the settings are. I found the recipes, easy to change, I found the miner speeds but I don't understand anything, and I cannot find the "give on player spawn" function. I'd like to remove this.

Config won't be implemented until after Factorio 0.15 is released (it should have a config UI).
The control.lua gives the starting miner.

Wow, I got on here just to comment on this mods unbalance. Balance is key for mods in my games.
A: Nerf the mining speed.
B: Huge increase in resources to be made.
C: Increase tech research cost.

One or several of these need to happen. I very much like the sprites, the way these can be driven up to inserters. They are fun to drive as well. I would enjoy higher tiers of them being able to move a little faster too. Very nice work here. I do hope these get updated and rebalanced in the future.

Im playing the version of the mod thats for v16.43 of Factorio..... with that said,
This is way too OP. This will defeat the purpose of ever using any other kinds of mining drills in game.
Within 20 minutes of game time, I have filled up the storage of this machine with coal
when starting the game. And as one goes and researches to finally get more, one comes to the conclusion that these are seriously out of balance with the original game mining drills. These machines will outshine and out mine any other mining drill in this game.

Would be nice if you can give a configuration file, so the players can balance the mod to their liking for their play style / game.
IMHO, the most these machines should have as far as bonuses to use them is about 5% of mining bonus, the most. just because they are mining excavators machine vehicles.
The way I would scale it is, - for each excavator on field, they would only have 0.2% bonus to mining for each excavator, up to the max of 5% with all excavators combined bonuses.

There's a mod setting now to change the mining speeds.