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.
Features
- Drag-select placement — select any ore patch and ghost miners appear in an optimal grid
- Two placement modes — Productivity (maximum drills, edge-to-edge) or Efficient (fewest drills, staggered rows)
- Full entity selection — choose drill type, transport belt tier, electric pole type, beacon type, and quality for each
- Beacon support — beacons fill alongside drill rows with configurable max and preferred counts per drill; includes beacon module selection
- Underground belts — automatically placed for 3×3+ 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
- Polite placement mode — only clears trees and rocks, preserving existing buildings
- Drill modules — select modules to insert into placed drill ghosts
- 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, and beacons
- 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)
How to Use
- Click the Miner Planner shortcut button in the toolbar (or press ALT+M)
- Drag-select an ore patch
- In the configuration GUI, choose your drill, belt, pole, beacon, and placement mode
- Click "Place Miners" — ghost entities are placed for bots to build
- Shift-drag over an area to remove previously placed ghosts
Mod Settings
All settings are per-player:
- Default placement mode — choose Productivity or Efficient as the default when opening the GUI
- 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)
Credits
Inspired by the P.U.M.P. mod. Built to make large-scale mining setups fast and painless.