So these days (again) the performance of the different drills have felt odd. Therefore i finally decided to undergo them all (of the relevant ones on planets) through a test. I placed 3 identical small HVs that fits through nearly every hole and then placed a single of the different drills on each. For further comparison i also tested a Mining HV with 6 laser drills that cover a bigger area as there are always 2 blocks space between each laser drill and furthermore i also testet my own miner with 6 laser drills. Long story short, my test results of 20 seconds continous drilling of rocks: Hand drill: 106 Mechanic drill: 119 Laser Drill: 130 Large drill: 435 HV with 6 laser Drill: 325 My Miner: 365 (My test attendants without my own miner.) The performance of the Handdrill is just slightly weaker than Mechanic drill which is just slightly weaker than the laser drill. Considering that i am not an exact working machine each count of rocks could vary ±5 rocks. Seeing these numbers i was first a bit happy as ingame i had the feeling that theres, barely a a difference between my miner and the hand drill. But they are also a bit confusing and disillusioning. Also considering that we can have 2 of the big drills on a HV which makes them even stronger as they already are than a combo of 6 laser drills. (Btw i love the huge tunnels that a such a HV builds =) ) But the balancing of these drills seems ridiculous. The only real still small advantage of the laser drills is the range. The hard numbers in the config files however tell us a different story: Laser drill: Damage: 1000 Radius: 2 Range: 8 max#: 6 Large Drill: Damage: 1200 Radius: 5 Range: 4 max#: 2 Mechanic drill: Damage: 750 Radius: 2 Range: 4 max#: 6 Hand Drill: Damage: 600 Radius: 2 Range: 7 max #: 1 So by these numbers the balancing seems straight and right, still my drilling test counterdicts very differently. Possible explanations could be: dps? i obviously missed that value somehow Area of affect: Is the damage dealt over the whole radius or on every single "square"? To work properly with an HV the radius of the Mechanic and Laser Drills need to overlap, the damage of seems to be counted only once and not being added on another. So some drill power gets lost here. I would suggest these changes: Weaken the hand drill (in damage and radius), it seems ridiculous strong, in another thread about placing blocks into the ground properly,people complain about the same issue. This would also make the HVs more valueable. Just today i met a plyer on the EXP server who never uses mining HVs as he finds them to struggling to use and not useful enough to learn how to use properly. Increase the damage and radius of the laser drills slightly, just so that there's a proper difference to the large drills, right now the large drills are kinda better which is according to the unlock level not intended and feels a bit weird. I am curios about others players feedback. PS: The test was performed on EXP Alpha 12.3.xxxx and could someone who know the config files better please validate the values i posted here and add the dps or rate of fire?
Also keep in mind that rock drops and such are randomized, so this can sometimes cause variance in the numbers posted.
I have hope that i compensated this with the drilling time of 20 seconds. But yes a proper test row could be done by increasing the time and to perform it around a planets core for a proper straight forward drilling. And then do it three times with each set. But i am too tired to do that now. But please feel free to go ahead
That is a problem with HV. Mining with a ground vehicle is a stupid idea anyway. Yes - it is doable when you get properly used to use, but compared to SV miners (requires mod) they are just plain horrible. As for the drills - I am not sure you can read much into the radius on the config files as I thin the real values are hard coded somewhere and/or there is something weird going one - especially with longer range laser type drills. From my own use, I suspect your figure with the 3 hand drills (survival, hand mech and hand laser) are an effect of how you are using them, so perhaps you ae not gaining what you should be from their range. Get close to the rock. I have always thought the radius of the basic HV drill is too low. Its doesn't need to go up by much, just the equivalent of a single small block in radius maybe. As for the large drill - that one does seem about right for tits size etc and TBH is the only one that feels more or less right. It is just a shame you cant tweak its height offset in config, or even better, dynamically in the game, but I guess that is part of whatever hacks they had to do to make HV based drilling practical at all. As for laser drills (hand, HV, CV incl turrets) - something feels really wrong with all of them in the way they are implemented. As far as I can tell, they each dig out of a sphere progressively along their path according to their rate of fire, limited by their range. I think the radius may actually control the sphere size - hard to tell. Either way - it often results in really nasty jagged digs and makes a right mess when you crank the damage up. Its a shame they could get a cylinder dig to work, or maybe they didn't try. Also I think the front offset of all vehicle mounted drills need to be pulled back a little to stop them skipping voxel as much. This is why the HV drill mode is so slow I suspect.
I have not tested the three hand drills, also the mechanical one is not in vanilla anymore. During the tests I was always moving as straight forward as possible. Further the radius in the Config files fits my experience so far, except that the big mechanic drill leaves a flat ground with a half pipe as top. Also I don't understand how the front offset could affect the drill speed?
No i misunderstood you earlier, i thought, you thought that i compared the 3 hand drill but you did not did you?
Better way to test properly and avoid randomization of rocks you want to mine is to start on a playfield, then spawn your testing HVs and make copies BEFORE starting to drill anything, each copy per HV. Finaly load each copy and do one test per HV. This ensures you are drilling the same deposit with the same amount of rocks per test. But as you said you are missing the DPS. Best scenario is also to spawn meteorites in front of HV on a BA platform for example and test drills on those... I think meteorites have fixed amount of ore.
Cant remember now TBH - probably I guess my point was (with any of them) to measure you need to be right up against the rock face I guess to measure full use of the drill range - but I guess it depends what you want to measure, because with the CV drills it takes a while to dig out their full range. Anyway - I do agree drills needs something of a review. I don't really get a sense of progress with mining in general (from landing to end game). Kind of feel like drilling with finger nails then suddenly over a cliff and mass drilling enabled. It isn't the drills, it more that I think the whole game progression and balance feels off. I will be interested to see what @Vermillion has done with reforged to improve on this as I keep wanting to redo it all, but want to see what he has done first - as maybe he has fixed it all Contrast with space engineers where I definitely feel much more of a sense of steady progression, I guess partly because you have a reason to want to go 1 then 2 drill, then 4/6/8 etc drill miner designs as you can afford them. In here I seems to go from hand drill to maxed out HV miner instantly (and now 8 drill SV miner due to modding). Factory is part of it perhaps, but then I used projector and nanite constructor in SE which basically do the same thing, albeit far more visually with more of a sense of thing happening as you throw resources into it (whereas factory is opaque and tending to make you twiddle thumbs while waiting). Not sure what it is really. Maybe a whole bunch of things, mass volume balance, thrust balance (to easy to make things fly in this?), maybe resource costs too? Cant really put my finger on it TBH. I still think basic HV drill needs its radius increasing as with it s current radius, it just isn't practical really to build small (1 or 2 drill) miners, you kind of have to go all or nothing - at least 4 drill, which feel around equivalent to a 2 drill in SE, but so much easier to construct and use due to much easier thrust and power availability etc. Im not trying to suggest this should be like SE, its just that is a reference that I am very used to and it feels like it flows very much better.
Just a little test with basic drill radius: I tried radius 3 - better in that smaller miners become more practical, maybe too much? I then tried 2.5 (wasn't sure it would accept a non-integer), this maybe seems about right. End result - this little 2 drill SV (could have just as easily have been an HV) miner becomes practical without it catching all over the place - a basic little two drill miner in its tunnel: Of note - for balance sake, I would expect something like this with 5k storage full of rock to feel really heavy when full. It has 4 x small thrusters down and can lift the 12.5t but is starting to feel heavy (as it should. If it were SE - you wouldn't be able to lift this much at all). I cant get a sense of this with HV thrusters because they just seems to list rather than run out of lift which seems odd. The material collection rate between 2.5 and 3 isn't that much even if the tunnel is visibly bigger and so easier to turn in, so maybe 3 would yield more build options and maybe feels closer to SE drilling which I have always felt seemed a better fit for common miner designs. Currently such little miners are pointless to build as by the time you get to level 7 to unlock them, most likely you have loads of resources, which come back to my issue with the current level based progression system just somehow not really working. I think we should have a reason to have to go through really basic tiny builds first, but level locks mean you end up bypassing that stage and somehow resource seem too plentiful and too easy to move around when you have a vehicle.
