Mining

Drills mine the ore fields that lie on the surface of the world. You build the burner-driven Wooden Drill from the start; the electric Auto Drill comes with the first research. You can also mine fields by hand, see Gathering by Hand.

Drills

	Wooden Drill	Auto Drill
Epoch	0	1
Unlocked by	Start	Steam Power
Size	2 × 2	3 × 3
Energy	fuel, 150 kW	electric, 90 kW
Mining speed	0.25 items/s	0.5 items/s
Output	front, in front of the left column	front, in the middle
Rune module slots	–	3
Noise	12 per minute	10 per minute
Recipe	3 Iron Gear + 3 Iron Plate + 1 Brick Furnace	3 Electronic Circuit + 5 Iron Gear + 10 Iron Plate

The mining speed is the rate on a full field with richness 1. See Noise and Unrest for what noise does, and Rune Modules for the module slots.

Placing a drill

• A drill mines what lies under the blocks of its footprint. Place it on an ore field; the map shows the fields in their colors.
• The front of a drill faces you when you place it. It drops each item straight into the block in front of its output: onto a belt, into a chest or into a machine.
• The Wooden Drill drops in front of its left column (left as seen from the drill). When you stand in front of it, facing it, that is the block in front of the right half.
• The Auto Drill drops in front of its middle.
• On a belt, a drill puts items on the near lane.
• If nothing takes the item, the drill waits and tries again. Nothing ever falls on the ground.

Fuel and power

The Wooden Drill burns fuel. Press Use to open its window with the fuel slot and the output, or crouch and press Use with fuel in your hand to fill it. A Grabber can keep it fed. Fuel values are listed under Smelting.

The Auto Drill takes no fuel. It needs a power pole nearby, see Power.

How much a drill yields

The yield depends on the ore blocks under the drill:

• Full coverage: a drill that stands entirely on ore mines at full speed.
• Partial coverage: a Wooden Drill with only one of its four blocks on ore mines a quarter as fast. Blocks without ore count as zero.
• Richness: every field is richest in the middle and gets poorer towards the edge, down to half at the rim. A drill in the center of a field mines faster than one at the border. The world settings can make fields richer or poorer, see World Settings.
• Mixed ores: if a drill stands on two kinds of ore, it mines them in turn, one item per ore block. The output is mixed in the ratio of the blocks. Sort it with a Splitter filter or a Grabber T3 (see Belts and Grabbers).

Ore fields never run out

Ore fields are infinite. A drill never exhausts its field, so a mine you build once keeps working for the rest of the game. Drills mine these fields:

Field	Item
Iron	Iron Ore
Copper	Copper Ore
Coal	Coal
Stone	Stone
Sand	Sand
Clay	Clay
Gold	Gold Ore
Uranium	Uranium Ore

Uranium needs Sulfuric Acid

Uranium Ore can only be mined by an Auto Drill with Sulfuric Acid: 1 unit of acid per ore. The Auto Drill has a pipe connection on one side of its back row for this. Without acid, it mines the other ores under it and skips the uranium; on pure uranium it waits. The Wooden Drill cannot mine uranium. See Fluids and Nuclear Power.

Oil

Oil does not come from drills. Oil fields hold single oil wells that an Oil Pumpjack pumps. See Oil Processing.

See also

• Smelting
• Belts
• The World
• Power
• Oil Processing