Miner Planner automates mining drill placement on ore patches. Drag-select an area, pick your drill, belts, poles, and beacons from an icon-based GUI, and ghost entities are placed in optimized paired-row layouts ready for construction bots. Works with all drill types, belt tiers, pole types, and resources across all planets.

Layout

Drills are placed edge-to-edge in paired rows for maximum ore throughput.

Features

• Drag-select placement — select any ore patch and ghost miners appear in an optimal grid
• Full entity selection — choose drill type, transport belt tier, electric pole type, beacon type, and quality for each
• Substation support — 2x2 electric poles (substations) have specialized placement logic with splitters and dual belt output lines for 5x5+ drills in productivity mode
• Beacon support — beacons fill alongside drill rows with configurable max and preferred counts per drill; includes beacon module selection
• Smart pole spacing — poles placed at optimal intervals based on supply area and wire distance; higher-tier or quality poles mean fewer poles needed
• Adaptive belt optimization — underground belts only where poles or substations occupy the gap; transport belts everywhere else for cheaper, visible item flow
• Underground belts — automatically placed for 3x3+ drills to keep belt runs clean
• 4-direction belt flow — north, south, east, or west
• Pipe placement — automatic pipes for fluid-requiring resources (e.g. uranium ore with sulfuric acid), with pipe type and quality selection
• Foundation placement — select landfill, ice-platform, or other foundation tiles to place under entities on water or frozen ocean
• Polite placement mode — only clears trees and rocks, preserving existing buildings; respects rail ramps and supports
• Technology-based filtering — GUI selectors only show entities whose recipes have been researched
• Drill modules and quality — select modules and quality level for drills independently from other entities (Space Age)
• Ore-type filtering — drills skip positions where the mining area overlaps a different ore type
• Obstacle clearing — trees, rocks, and cliffs in the placement zone are marked for deconstruction
• Ghost cleanup — shift-drag to remove placed ghost miners, belts, poles, pipes, beacons, and foundation tiles
• Remember settings — skip the GUI on repeat placements and reuse your last configuration
• Multi-planet support — works with any resource on any surface (Nauvis, Vulcanus, Fulgora, Gleba, Aquilo)
• Mod compatibility — auto-discovers modded drills, belts, poles, beacons, pipes, and 2x2 substations

How to Use

1. Click the Miner Planner shortcut button in the toolbar (or press ALT+M)
2. Drag-select an ore patch
3. In the configuration GUI, choose your drill, belt, pole, and beacon
4. Click "Place Miners" — ghost entities are placed for bots to build
5. Shift-drag over an area to remove previously placed ghosts

Mod Settings

All settings are per-player:

• Always show configuration GUI — when disabled, uses remembered settings to skip the GUI
• Max beacons per drill — upper limit on how many beacons can affect a single drill (1–12, default 4)
• Preferred beacons per drill — target beacon count; placement stops once each drill reaches this number (0 = no limit, default 1)

Requirements

• Factorio 2.0+
• Optional: Space Age expansion (for multi-planet resources and quality)

Credits

Inspired by the P.U.M.P. mod. Built to make large-scale mining setups fast and painless.