Which of the mining device categories do you think works the best in GENERAL?

"In general" is kind of vague.
Are we talking about on planet "in general"?
Are we talking about in space "in general"?
Are we talking about deposits on planet? Are we talking about surface rocks on planet?
Or are we talking about mining in space?

They are all very different.
If I had to group them all together then nothing beats handheld drill, IMO.

Sv drills only mine a very narrow beam and are actually kind of terrible in vanilla, IMO, because they don't clear enough area and typically can't even fit through their own hole last time I checked.

Drill turrets are basically useless unless you are playing MP and have faction mates to man them (usually faster to just use handheld drill and drone).

And HV fixed drills mine out a large enough area but HV's are terrible to control in a hole. They are slightly easier with voxel deposits but suck real bad with SSOR deposits.

So I vote handheld drills.

Edit
CV fixed drills are very overpowered but don't function on planets, so not a real consideration when talking mining "in general" IMO

 

My personal Preference is the Hand-/Drone-held Drill. The Drone is the most flexible Miner Assistant in use. On Planets AND in Space. Especially in the Stages of the Game before getting access to CV-Drill Turret-which I prefer above fixed Drills.

 

CV turret works the best but sv drills make up for it in untility

 

In vanilla? Hand drills.
Their ridiculous overpoweredness removes the entire reason to make an HV or SV miner when a hand drill can do the same job, without specialized equipment, no added mass or no unlockable devices in the same amount of time.

If a piece of equipment in the game is not used, it has no purpose. Don't make a game of purposeless devices. It wastes everyone's time, including the devs.

 

This depends on context, like already mentioned by others.

I chose HV turret drill for its range, but it could be the handheld/drone held drill too for freedom of movement. If in space, of course it can't be the HV so it will also depend on context. Handheld needs recharges, while a HV drill can work with biofuel (HV powered), and this means easier to operate if counting all steps to get proper fuel for each type.

Mining with vehicles mean less mobility in tight spaces, but more protection and immediate access to powerful weapons in case of sudden danger. Vehicles also have the benefits of the harvest cargo box. I think that with minimal adjustments, all drills have their use in game.

 

I run a modded game and this means I have SVs with both small and large mechanical drills as well as the mechanical hand drill that was disabled .

What I want is an SV specific large drill without the asymmetry. Mining in general is very tedious past early game (see my post in voxel vs stones thread).

I really hate hand mining - even with the hand laser drill, but accept it in early game, but level 7 can never come soon enough.
With my modded game, I use a tiny SV with only a couple of drills on it at level 7.
I dont use HVs at all - they are a broken hacky, glitchy bad idea.

TBH an HV with a pair of large drills works best with a suitable HV design. The drills cut out volumes are too small and the device limit of 6 just makes many useful size HV miners to tight a fit especially when combined with their horrible behaviour inside a dug out hole (mining mode help, but really it is just a nasty hack attempt to make a bad idea work and I hate it). Really HVs are just not suitable as miners at all. The other hack you have for HV is with the asymetric large drills, because that is basically the only way you could make it work with an HV. Does this not tell you that mining with an HV isnt a good idea?

Mining turrets - they are annoying. The volume they hoover up is obviously much better, but having to drop out of turret mode, move vessel, hunt around in device list to find the damn thing again quickly gets annoying. Adding mining turrets to the tool bar would at least help the UI aspect of this.

TBH I dont like the way that lasers work current (they make too much of a mess, are not true volumetric as they are raycast based and not spherecast. I also think Mining lasers work in a really bad way by carving out what seems to be a series of spheres and they make a terrible mess of the ground. I guess mining drills do the same thing, but because the drill is slower, the bad aspect of this is not so pronounced. Use a cylinder instead especially for lasers.

On CV, drills vs turret - I am starting to use the turret more and more instead of drills mainly because often it is more convenient to have a turret than 6 drills.

I think CV mining tools should be unlock at much lower level - every mining related tool across all vessel types should be unlocked by 15.

So preference in order these days (order of least despised):
CV turrets despite my dislike of turret mining.
CV drills.
SV drills (modded mechanical, both small and large - please make a non asymetric SV large drill).
SV turret (the HVs turret on an SV).
HV drills (never use the turret on an HV).
Hand drills.
Survival tool.

To those who keep going on about how good hand drills are - granted they are decent when mining the most basic ores, but for harder ores, vessel mounted drills win easily. I also suggest you are just bad at using HV miners. (Yes, HV mining is awful, but I still find it MUCH faster than hand).

I don't really sue auto miners either. I used to back in A11, but far easier to go find another asteroid.

Mining needs an overhaul, not just in mechanics, but in deposits, arrangement of deposits, size of them, gameplay around them etc.

 

I roll with a mixture of autominers and CV turret mining.

I usually build permanent mining outposts with autominers and a water treatment plant for a steady income of "running resources" like promethium, pentaxid and water. And use a mining CV to mine other resources from asteroids. If fuel, pentaxid and O2 consumption can't be met, I build more autominer outposts.

In the late game when I have all my main craft built and no longer need large amounts of resources, I build autominer outposts for other resources as well. Just enough to cover the cost of repairs.

Being able to link up autominers and water generators to the logistics network would be great. It would make resource collection runs so much easier.

 

Really interesting that some people like the turret mining here. I never liked them, as 6 fixed drills were always faster. I actually don't see a real advantage in the turret mining.

Anyway i choose CV fixed drill simply because it's the fastes, and its still too slow for my taste (I kinda like "to throw around" my Ressources as you can see here and here.) BTW the standart range of CV drills and CV Multitoolturrets is way too low. Speciall if you want to repair space Bases with the Multitoolturret.

I also like the HV drilling with fixed drills. If you know how to build a drilling HV it can be really fun when playing with oneor two others to travel from planet to planet and suck their deposits out. BTW a little honory thanks here to the guy who posted the ladybug HV drill in the workshop a couple of yeras ago. With that one i learned to build HVs =).

Hand drilling is death. The survival tool is overpowered, the laser drill is underpowered(actually i am not sure haven't used it in vanilla for some time) and the mechanical drill is gone. (Props to the reforged Eden makers here, i dunno who of you is responsible for the drilling but before you feel to happy about my little compliment: Drilling in Reforged Eden is a very unpleasent thing, actually i hate it!)

And before we forget about it. The Automining Devices. I really really don't understand, why it just works for 14 hours when you stuffed 15 fusion cells in it. Shouldn't a T3 AM be able to work for 24 hours?

 

I was thinking not only does what people use vary from planet,space or type of deposit it could vary on if you play mostly single player or on a server. For example it can be real fun cruising around in a hover vessel mining lots of Meteorite deposits on a official server but for some people that only play single player might not enjoy using it with natural deposits.

 

Mining is one of the reasons I jumped to Eden Reforged.
The handheld Miner is so OP in the base game, like you can just walk forward while holding down left-click.

In Eden Reforged there is a progression, where you are using the mechanical drill for a while and when you build a HV with drills it really feels good to be able to mine faster! Then when you make a SV with laser drills and start eating Asteroids, it feel like you have unlimited resources. lol. (SV asteroid drilling still feels OP to me, but I know most do not agree with me.)

And I know it's not part of this poll, but it is closely related; I think auto miners really need to be reworked. They just don't really fit with the design and theme of the game, in my opinion.

 

My two cents is that CV fixed is incredibly OP. Even one is OP. The drill area is just enormous and takes no time at all to cut through any asteroid. The turret is just too inconvenient to use as others have mentioned. Its useful as a targeting decoy and that's about it.

However, I find nothing really beats the hand drill up to that point due to the wireless network and its automatic loading. Why bother with SV/HV when you can just park your CV on top of the node, link to a cargo bay and just go to town without fooling around with limited volume? Not to mention with the hand drill on you can almost free fall through rock. Sure, the higher tier ores take a bit (slightly) longer but you still don't have to mess with anything using direct transfer. No vehicle management, no stopping for inventory management. Just drill drill drill and then get the heck out of dodge. Easy peasy.

I do have an HV miner but never use it after wireless networks went in. It is far less convenient. You can only make one so big or heavy before they get difficult or risky to use (cargo volume/mass does not go hand-in-hand with twisting around underground) and the drills only carve out an area just larger than the hull, which adds more of a limit. Then its manual wireless transfer juggling to CV when hand drill does this automatically. So why bother? Even before getting to CV's I have a simple heavy lifter SV that is not much more than a CV sized cargo box and I direct wireless transfer using the hand drill. Much less hassle, cost and risk of getting stuck upside-down with higher payloads as well as just flying back to base is also simpler than driving.

 

I think it's great that the mining has been sped up. I always thought that mining should be about overcoming obstacles (through fighting and/or engineering) to locate and get to the deposit, instead of overcoming boredom to spend hours slowly mining it out in complete safety.

I think that allowing the handheld drill to be used by the drone is just as bad for gameplay/balance as allowing the drone to use a rocket launcher inside a POI. The unique and interesting thing about the handheld drill is that you have to be out there in the weeds, watching your back in case something wants to attack you while you're mining. Also having to drill a tunnel that you can get back out of so you don't get stuck. (This was especially more fun back when there were lots of wandering drones and you never knew when one would come by, and you could hear their menacing fan blades far off in the distance.)

The hand drill being limited to hand use makes the HV miner a step up since only then can you sit in an environmentally-controlled cockpit that has turrets to alert/defend you.

It (using the drone to hand-drill) also eliminates the ability to restrict certain ores from lower-tech mining by putting them in inhospitable environments. You can just build a little ship that you stand inside of, launch the drone out the window and go drill everything. Boring.

Without the drone-drilling, a deposit on a tough planet requires you to come up with a mining ship and a way to get it down to the planet's surface. (So an HV that can drill, and a CV that can carry it inside.) And then you also have to worry about drones/PV coming along and attacking your CV while you're out there mining. So you need to clear the area first, and strategically park, and plan for disaster so you can escape by other means if need be. Etc.

The autominers are awful. I'll say again that the process of automining should require building something that enemies will want to attack and can attack. I'd like to see a base component that does "deep mining" that you can build over top of a deep deposit. You supply lots of power and it produces ore. These are separate from the regular deposits and are simply a location on the map, no structure or anything necessary, the voxel terrain does not get altered by the deep drillers. You'd have to fly by (or teleport in) here and there to refuel, repair, and collect your ores. If you don't have enough weapons on it, it takes damage in your absence and possibly loses ore to thieves/raiders.

 

I prefer to mine using the CV drill turret, it's so fast.
Everytime I restart on official server I'll do the same thing, build a base then a CV with a single drill turret and 320k ore storage. I don't use HV miners anymore and use hands drills until I get my first mining CV.
The only problem with mining with the drill turret is you have to change position and reselect turret in the control panel, it's a lot of clicking. I wouldn't have to if there was a key to switch to previous view, from pilot seat to turret in that case.

 

So... 'in general', as has been stated, is a little weird of a way to ask this. *but*... I'm going to assume that you mean 'If you had your choice of any set of equipment to use to go mining, what would it be?', and the answer for me is pretty clearly the CV drill turret. I don't 'go mine an asteroid' I delete the entire asteroid, including getting all of the stone which I just run through a small array of constructors to turn into other base ores. I mean... I'm not sure how to balance it either. Piloting the CV to turn around and get to the ores if it didn't do what it did would be ridiculously painful... but still the ability to completely delete an entire asteroid in just a couple of minutes...

 

I like using the CV mining laser for the speed - but it hurts my OCD to see bits left in the swiss cheese.
I think it would be nice if different mining tools were different "efficiencies" to encourage players to tier up. Using a hand tool/drone when you are flying around in a giant CV just feels weird and wrong.
How about
- Leave current hand/drone mining alone
- With each ship tier, increase the volume carved out. HV/SV, then CV the max
- But, adjust the efficiency/chances of getting an ore so that SV tools have a higher chance/yield more ores than a CV.

So now there's player tension between building an SV miner that yields more ore per asteroid, and building a CV miner that chomps the whole thing faster. And maybe even within a single game - use your CV for ice/iron asteroids since they're a dime a dozen, but your SV for erestrum/pentaxid asteroids for max yield since they're rare.

 

There comes a point in the game where the amount of resources that you need to mine to build what you want at the game stage just make mining an utterly mind numbing chore whatever manual way you have to go about it.

When a build requires gobbling several asteroids of each resource, then I am way past giving a damn about efficiencies of one method vs another - just want to get this tedious activity over with as quickly as possible.

 

I hear you. I'm at the point in my personal game where I just trade commodities to get a few million credits, and just buy up every ore at the mining stations whenever I see one.

 

The response is obvious here going by the QUANTITY PER TIME you're able to mine, and the best candidate is of course the SV fixed drill, but this is not reflected in the votes, people will just answer according to what they use at the moment without even knowing what alternative can be much better, so you could as well have asked 'what mining device do you use'? And that's irrelevant because in the early game you don't have much of a choice but the auto-miner and Multitool / hand drills which are all bad in ore return/time.

Mining an asteroid with multiple drills mounted on a SV gets me 3000-3400 ores in a few time compared to any planet depot which only yields about 800 ores, taking much more time and this for whatever tool I'm using. Knowing that, there should not even be any discussion, the numbers speak for themselves.

A drill mounted on a CV is possible but plain stupid IMO, a CV is clumpsy to maneuver in the 'holes' created by mining, so it takes longer to mine the same asteroid compared to a small mobile SV. A good reason why there are very fine-designed small SVs on the workshop mounted with as many as 6 drills, once you're using these you don't want to change anymore.

 

For most mining a hand drill combined with the player drone.

For sapping an HV with enough well placed laser drills to cut it's own tunnel is hard to beat for getting under a POI quickly. The El Chapo is particularly nice for a couple of players as it includes an enclosed passenger compartment, a clone chamber, as well as a medical station and a fair amount of cargo space.

For asteroid mining late game a CV miner.