You can use the driller to level up the ground up to the inside of your ship. You should be able to put the auto miner on it. As for me, I don't use Auto miner and I don't mine either. Buying ingots and ores is a lot faster (in single player).
In 1.5 Vanilla Solo the nearest Talon village that you go to in storyline has a Furnace! I gather ore and drop it in and go do other things. It's the soonest you get access to a Furnace and makes life pretty smooth in the early game. The Medicine man has a Food Processer too! Great for making Meds to sell. Gives you a mini base with advanced devices you didn't have to build. EDIT: Fixed bad sentence ... Oh it isn't THAT bad anymore. Yeah, there was a lot of dramatic changes back in A5-12 but it's fairly stable now that 1.5 is out. I suspect the changes in the major 1.5 will be around for a long time (for the most part). They'll always be some "tuning" but I think we're fairly stable on the big stuff ... IMNSHO
It's very likely you're right, but... aside from any potential Eleon-changes that could be A5-12 dramatic, keep in mind that this IS Unity-based, and Unity has pulled some major engine-change doozies over the past, well, since Unity debuted. I can think of a few Unity-based titles that were making great progress, then went "Next week we'll be updating to the new Unity engine...." and then on life-support for 6-16 months, as the engine changes were so extensive the dev teams were all but relearning the engine (ok, really they were just recoding a ton of stuff), a few had to be rolled back to the previous build to stay usable, but these things do happen. I can't think of any where this proved to be an actually bad thing, but they were some major things, and in a few cases, made some pretty big stinks in the community, usually typical Steam-stinks (Game's dead/been abandoned/was a scam/want a refund) because that's just how the instant-gratification crowd rolls. So waiting things out isn't a big deal for me, plus I really want to know what Eleon plans for their own game before I start delving into the Community version anyways. From my own side, I've done more than a bit of modding over the years, including a number of deemed "Must Have" mods for some other games as well, so I'm more than aware how changes, even sometimes seemingly minor changes, can result in the need for some major reconstruction as well. I even have my own pet project for Empyrion that's a good bit... different than anything out there right now, though when I first began tinkering with it, it was back when the galaxy map was a tiny little thing of some 10-12 star systems. The change to the galaxy map alone was enough to send me pretty much back to square one, so I've put that on hold as well, though I fully intend to finish it once I know I won't be staring down a full-fledged re-write either.
