Hello,

Do you think that it would make more sense conceptually if Deep Core Mining Drills produced Deep Core Chunks in need of further refining instead of straight up vanilla ores? Doesn't it seem a bit weird that you have to deal with refining if you mine deep ore patches by hand with the planner, and also when mining cracks with the advanced drill, but the "middle" tier of drills bypasses the refining entirely?

Additionally, wouldn't it fit better conceptually if the mining drones were used as fuel by the drills, both regular and advanced, instead of being ingredients in some, but not all, refining processes?

Hello,

About patch yield, I was actually thinking about it when I refactored the chunks icons. But I'm still hesitating as even if it would indeed make more sense, this would be a big change that would break people existing factory logistics.

For the mining to consume drones that was my first tought but didn't find an simple way to implement it on the miner entity. I could take a look again I saw something similar in the Pymods.

Thanks for your feedback !

Regarding using arbitrary items as fuel, as far as I understand how it works, you just define a new fuel category, and give your items (mining drones here) fuel value as this category, and then make your miners' energy source a burner using this fuel category. So the drills would basically become burner drills, but with a different fuel category, "burning" drones. But due to being a different category, the drones wouldn't work anywhere that expects regular chemical or nuclear fuel.

Thanks for your response!

The concept really grew on me and I implemented it in a big major new version.

I would be glad if you could take a look and provide feedback !

[deleted]

Great news! The changes seem good on the surface, I'll have some more substantiated feedback in a few days once I get a chance to actually implement it in my factory.

One thing that comes to mind is that deep cracks may be a too small fish to be scattered individually as they are. Each one would require setting up an outpost with not really any less work than a normal vanilla outpost, but the output is just around one blue belt of stuff (taking reasonable mining productivity bonus into account) which becomes even less stuff when processed. So maybe cracks could be rarer, but grouped in clusters of something like 2-5 so it's not just one crack at a time. That's just from the numbers, though, I'm not sure how it plays out in practice.