Yep, enough people have mentioned the rotating head that I probably should have addressed it in the video originally. My experience with rotating heads has been rocky, puns aside, I have had numerous issues with their use. I haven't used them since the major physics rework, but I am wary of trying again. Any time rotors or other moving parts are entered into the equation, clang has an open door to your build. I keep my miners "solid state" simply to reduce failure points to a minimum, at the cost of a little convenience and/or ore output.
@@SpIattercaster ahh okay. I see. there are other ways. But they may be hard or easy to install. Example 1 is a rotating head. Example 2 Overridden gyro that spins at a certain rate. These 2 are ways to fix that
yep, you could go with a 'TBM' style of ship too, using 5x5 hull design, and landing gears with pistons, but in space, i would just go with the rotor 5x1 drill setup. i also build it without refiners, and just make it dock with a mothership. just replace the refiners with 2 large cargo containers. unless you have about 8 upgraded refiners, or on a non 1x server, it takes a while to refine anyways, so you can just cruse around rock to rock. i also just make my mining ship battery powered with a single small reactor for emergencies. much cheaper and easy to fix. just make sure you have survival station on it and your golden. I usually also have a armory with a drill, weapon, tools, and ammo incase you somehow die. you can even stuff a small H2 tank and O2 tank on it, just so that its a standalone mining ship/escape craft if your main ship gets exploded.
Thanks. There is a wide variety of designs people have come up with to tackle the challenges of space and this is just my current best for the parameters I mentioned.
I usually go for huge rigs with 7x7 spaced drills. But this is the best functionality to pcu ratio I've ever seen. Makes my chonkers seem very inefficient. Though there's something nice about being on a friend's server and mining 10 million ore in one go
@@albiorix9645 yep, this is the best mining ship, not sure it needs to be in heavy armour though. This chonker replaced most of my own builds. Shame the author gave it no description and didn't include its name ("Bore") in the listing..
I've utilized some of the building techniques that you've shown here, like the thruster placement and narrow profile for efficient through-mining, yet they weren't anywhere near as thoughtfully and elegantly built as your mining rig here! I'll definitely be utilizing this design during my next space survival playthrough.
A quick tip for the right click destroy/erase voxel: if you right-click the drills then go in the inventory of the ship, release the right button only in the inventory of the ship, then the drills will keep on being in destruction mode even when you are no longer in the ship inventory menu. It will stop if you right-click and release again or get out of the cockpit. I find this useful when I want to drill long tunnels and not constantly pressing the right buttons for long periods of time.
It’s the most breathtakingly beautiful design I’ve ever seen in space engineers. I was just searching for large scale excavation methods for an underground base, and this definitely isn’t that, but I’m immensely pleased with what I found instead
Glad to see someone else using timer blocks to respawn TP. Nice miner, looks great and I will be using. So thankful you have uploaded a NO DLC version. Great work, thanks for the time that was clearly invested in learning all of these techniques and folding them into one Maximus Miner
For utility work, I do like to have more braking thrust than forward thrust. Makes them a little bit easier to control, especially when in full load. Nevertheless, a wonderful design!
I totally understand, nothing like flying past your destination at 70m/s and regretting your previous decisions lol. This ship is pretty slow to accel/decel when you are fully loaded. It was a compromise I made for less PCU and a more compact design. Thanks for the comment.
Well, I didn't find that boring, at all. I love this format of talking through the design. Wish more RUclipsrs did it. Yeeting stone away with a grav gen is cool and something I hadn't thought of but I usually build small grid miners that launch from a carrier. I may have to try this.
Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it. I have a lot more Space Engineers content I could share, plenty of evil stuff too like how to triangulate player locations, abuse safe zones, and my massively overpowered vanilla clang drive. Some people don't want that info shared though.
I made a similar design 2 years ago. But it was a remote-controlled miner, using small blocks. This is an effective and efficient design for large scale mining. I like it. Nice job!
Interior turrets also make for good rotating cameras. As you travel through space you can zoom in on passing asteroids to see if they might have an ore on the surface, and you can do this without having to move the entire ship using just a static camera.
I made a similar one a while ago, but on hydrogen. It wasn't self-sufficient or anything, in terms of refining/crafting, but I had a O2/H2 generator, a hydrogen generator for charging the onboard battery, a large container and 4 drills. Later I realized the potential and expanded it to 30-ish drills, and it's a beast, that also clips the audio, which sounds very unpleasant. Note that I only play singleplayer, so some features here are completely useless to me, which means the miner can be that much more compact in my case, and I am willing to spend 7 minutes getting back from an asteroid to my base, which is definitely not an excuse to not have a jumpdrive... Yours is much more refined, and the forward/backwards thruster placement is indeed genius, good job!
Wow, this is such a clean and utilitarian setup. I'm not very good at building ships even after almost 700 hours 😅 so seeing this kind of "simple" ship being so functional and well built is really awesome!
@@SpIattercaster also, I never knew drills had the same terrain "deleting" feature that the hand drill does. I really appreciate the time spent explaining the build. It really helps me apply the same principles and ideas into my own builds. Really top notch video
That's awesome, thanks for sharing. My long-overdue hydrogen version will debut soon BTW. It was made at roughly the same time as this one but I never got around to making a video. Cheers!
Great explanation of your ship! Well thought out, and thank you for the hows and whys! Most people just give you a tour but not the logistics! Great job!
certainly has all the bells and whistles you could possibly want on a miner. definitely well thought out. a bit too all encompassing for my tastes though. best miner design i had was a dedicated atmospheric minor with tomes of storage. later on i put hydro thrusters on it but definitely did the trick.
I’ve made a similar miner, it had a big drilling head, was hydrogen powered, hauled 3 large cargo containers, had a refinery, a jump drive, a reactor, even an assembler for field repairs, it served great on the server I played on until the server died... it even had ports for basic defensive weaponry
This is quite literally the first ship I ever built on my own in space engineers. I didn't have the jump drive camera or respawn teleporter. I also didn't have the stone ejector since I actually processed all of it. I didn't deem it necessary for respawning since I had the Ibis respawn shuttle. I did lose the ship because while I was mining the ibis was destroyed and I suffocated because I didn't think to add an o2h2 generator and couldn't find where my ice went in time. I also used 3rd person indeed of camera and had an extra drill there.
I legit thought everyone would have something similar and thought my ship was nothing special. It's just common sense to make big mining drill for asteroids. But everyone had all these small automated drones for that back when scrips were the only way to automate. My big drill when I rebuild didn't like the code and just flew away infinitely so once I caught up and brought it back to my new base I just disassembled it for parts because automated mining was everything back then.
@@SpIattercaster oh I will. What I was looking for overall. Saw lots of really cool yet humongous refinery factory ships but the core components are pretty spread out and so you have to practically build the whole ship before you can use it to help build itself. small grid miners are a dime a dozen but cannot carry the assembler/refinery Never really saw anything in between to get me to the big builds. All the tutorials say 'build a base and build a mining ship' By the time I got a refinery I would be visited by hostile mobs and be forced to abandon my fresh built refinery in favor of my small grid miner and I was back to my survival kit. That only happened once but I've been leery about building stationary defenseless bases ever since. I might use your design to come up with my own version.
Your miner is one of the most efficient designs that I have seen. It definitely looks like it will get the job done. Just in case it happens to you where only one drill or weapon works. There is a little known command and that's the MMB. I believe it's for (for example) when you have two weapons on your ship and only want to fire one for whatever reason. I'm sure it could be used for other purposes as well. I use the left click (Harvest) and right click (Excavate) method to clear out the stone from around the ore deposits as well. I've used your system to mine, with good success but sometimes also with mixed results. When the drills "bumped" into the yet to be mined material, the speed would drop and it would eventually come to a stop. My semi-automatic mining system differs from yours because of this reason. I have a fleet of mining drones equipped with, besides the necessary equipment, a sensor, two timer blocks and a extra small thruster set on override in the back. I call them worms because they go through asteroids like worms through apples. It works in this manner. The sensor detects the asteroid and starts what I call the pulse timer. The timer has three commands. One is to turn the drills on. then turn On/Off the pulse thruster and the last one is to restart the timer. When the asteroid is detected the pulse timer turns the pulse thruster on for a few seconds to get the miner moving at around .50 ms and then shuts it off. the drills gently bumps into the asteroid and mines a chunk out. By that time the timer repeats and pushes the miner further into the tunnel. The second timer is for canceling the mining. If coming out the other side and the sensor no longer detects the asteroid and just shuts off the pulse thruster, the pulse timer will just fire it up again. If it stops the pulse timer, the pulse thruster may be on and it'll just keep going. The sensor also triggers the second timer which stops the pulse timer, turns off the pulse thruster and turns off the drills. After that I just clear the drone from the asteroid and set it's auto pilot to head back to base. Other than to check on the drone's mining progress from time to time and to dock it in its docking port when it returns, it is pretty much a hands free operation. One thing that I don't understand is that the sensors will detect "asteroid" voxels but doesn't detect "planet and moon" voxels, at least from my experience. One might say that it is a hold back from the old days before planets but isn't a voxel a voxel? I mean for all intent and purposes, isn't a planet just a big asteroid with different textures?
I used to use a miner almost exactly like that but I do a couple things differently now. I use the five drills in a straight row and do "rake" mining, as I only stop for surface deposits pretty much or right click if needed, and I employ the basic refineries for stone with sorters set in such a way so I can still use the full refinery with yield modules with stone, and I dump gravel instead of stone. It actually refines it faster than it mines it, and the ingots are very much worth it to me. I actually never mine iron, nickel, or silicon. ore because stone is so common, I get enough while mining cobalt, gold, silver, and uranium. So for me space engineers has like four ores, or five including ice lol. Another pro tip is I only use ice for H2, I get all my O2 from either farms, or a vent set to depressurize and suck it out of any planet except for the one moon. Makes H2 a bit cheaper, but I can easily use ice in emergencies. :) Hope these tips are interesting!
First: Excellent design, thanks a lot for sharing, we are still using one ship in your original design!! Then I took your design, rebuilt it to H2 thrusters, replaced the refinery with tanks and more cargo. That makes the miner usable on moons up to 1mio kg total weight (of course it can't survive totally on its own in case of damages this way). PS: Simply attaching a flying tank as ore detector makes exploration of asteroids a lot faster
Thanks! I would love to see your design. I have a hydrogen version of this that is undergoing final testing and I just haven't really had the time to push it out yet.
First i was like "whats this after 8 years?" But i just didnt expect it to be practical and efficient to the max. After hearing your thoughts it quickly was obvious that this is not just a regular cube, its used a lot of knowledge and basically minimized everything else and it surely works perfectly as "insurance". I like that idea. Its also a good example for new players for what is possible to do.
Thanks, I didn't spend 8 years exclusively refining this design of course, rather I amended it many times during that time frame. It's just the culmination of the designs of many similar miners that lived and died in survival.
After a 1000h in game, I also have designed my fully self-sufficient miner, but I focused more on the design rather than functionality. I often use the respawn trick to travel, although my timer block is always on and it just loops, so when I need to respawn, I only have to turn the survival kit off, and I know for sure that the timer block will turn it back on eventually.
Good design, my favorite miner has always been the same, a 3x3 bore drill, but never used a refinery on it, this is ingenious, mine was just 9drills + 20small ions per side + cockpit, ore detector, 2gyros, 4smallreactors, surv kit + 1large cargo + 6small ions (reverse) + top/bottom connectors + 3small ions, 1 large ion. No conveyors, just 1 large cargo and small cargos. Good job. 👍👍👍
This reminds me of my drill ship Glassy. Its 3x3 like yours, but a bit smaller and simply made. It has a h2\o2 gen, spherical grav gen, 1 small reactor, a few small cargos, and 1 large cargo. It is due for an upgrade and I was thinking of adding a survival kit to it. Oh, the reason it is called Glassy is because I put glass all over it to act as armor to protect it as I drill and bump around. Last update however has changed something and now the large cargo seems to take damage any time I bump any part near the front. I think my new version will have armor plates rather than glass. I recommend doing something similar to yours, especially on a server. You never know when Lag and Clang will throw a party on your grid
Question if I may. The drill heads clear a specific area per drill, so you can place the drills apart one drill width. If you did that, you could remove the four center drills in between the corner drills, thus making it as effectively efficient and reduce cost and weight, yes? I am two weeks old and still have a LOT to learn of course. Thank you kindly for any responses, tips and or recommendations. I found out that you can add status lights next to the cockpit and have them come on when your cargo container and or drills are full. You want a light to come on (yellow or preferred color) when the cargo container is full and a light to come on when the drills are full. That way you won’t waste ore by trying to monitor your weight as a guesstimate of when to stop drilling. Anyway, take care, be safe and I love the design. I am currently building a base and learning the ins and outs. It will be a while before I get to space and hopefully land on a moon, planets or asteroids to go on further adventures. Take care! 😇😎🫡
reminds me of one i made very simular . i made it 5x5 the main stuff was 3x3 like yours but it was covered in heavy blocks all the way around for added protectionmaking it 5x5. used it on a very hostile server. very nicely done . and its funny becuase it also took me a while to come to the worm miner setup as well.
Really like the design. i made a ship in this kinda theme but went with 6 thrusters in a messy random placement. I went with 5 drills and just have it rotate to deal with the voxels that poke into the hole I'm drilling. Never thought of using the gravity gen. will definitely try that out. Thanks for sharing this, makes me want to go clean up my design. lol
I have a trick I use when controlling the drills with the mouse: if you enter into the ship’s menu while holding down the button, the drills will continue to work without holding down the button and they will keep working until you exit out of the menu _and_ click a mouse button, or when you leave the cockpit. I use this when controlling one of my stationary mining rigs with multiple pistons, rotors, and hinges. With this ship, you could use it along with your “cruise control” to auto-clear a bunch of voxel.
If you are collecting a large amount of stone and it clogs the queue, it will start refining stone. Make it so that its whitelisted to eject gravel too
You can quickly and easily modify it to work with 2, maybe 3 drills by giving it a rotating head. A 5 drill head would be gravy ! 4 outer, 1 center and youll have some wiggle room in the tunnel with your miner. I imagine its got enough mass behind it to keep it from locking up and turning the ship. I think I would at least cover it in plates or huge sheets of glass though (since apparently its a good armor) and sneak in some stratigic welders to keep it fixed to prevent wiggle damages to the importaint bits. Another thing you can do is route the stone into basic refineries instead of ejectors to maximize your haul.
Awesome ship. I can't wait to use some of your ideas. One thing I would do personally is to put a conveyor sorter between your main connector and conveyor system and set it to blacklist nothing, so you don't accidentally drain all the stone off your connected grid if you forget to turn off your garbage sorter. But I tend to mine a lot of stone in my bases so that may not be useful to anyone but me.
If you have your SK timer always on and counting then there's no risk of forgetting it when switching SK off. Good mining design, very clean and has everything you need. It's the perfect starter ship.
True, I think the reason I switched back from that method is that you don't know where in the cycle the timer is when you go to turn the medbay off, and after enough false respawns I got sick of it. If the timer loop is long enough it should be a rare occurrence though. Here's a question: does the grid de-render and stop the timer from reactivating the medbay? My gut tells me know but experience tells me this may have been a problem in the past in SE.
Sorry, I used the term medbay interchangeably with survival kit. They function exactly the same in regards to spawning the character. My point is both ways of using the timer block have a pitfall. With the manual toggle, you can forget to toggle it. With the automatic toggle you don't know when the SK is turning back on, and might need to backspace more than once. Not a huge deal but it was enough of an annoyance that I went back to the manual toggle. Play around with it and you'll see what I mean.
I love your "No Nonsense" approach. Do you have a PRE-Nuclear similar style drilling rig? I'm doing my first fully-true Survival playthrough and I'm looking to build my first Asteroid Miner. I love your elegant and simplistic design!
I did a similar miner, less advanced (no jump nor cruise, well manual cruise) but with an array of ejectors in the back as a deffensive weapon, giving a spacial delectable new meaning to "eat my dust" for undesired followers. But, yeah, I made it way too big (solo), what can I say, I was bored of boring so I made my mouth bigger. I also included a projector that has a scale of 5 blocks units (red-white), 100 blocks long, and that is a size of the ship frame, cage, so I can plan efficiently the entry points and avoid overlapsing, even the exit point. This game is way too fun. Now I need a better computer to use my miner, yep!
I used to build this type of miner all the time back in the day. Though I would make it SUUUUUUPER long. Lots of onboard refineries, blast furnaces, and assemblers. I like to cover it in glass "Armor". Slightly less clangtastic, but more importantly it makes it shiny!
This is an absolute beauty :O Any advice for building mega drills like this? I’d like to learn how to make a version of this fitted to my needs since I feel a little bad about copy-pasting other folk’s designs
Interesting. Most miners I make are based off the main idea of my original "explorer" ship using hydrogen and a not so good drill output, cause its designed to be able to survive combat. I play on lots of more "modded" servers with a 13 drill limit and more centralized mining zones. Nice to see an exact opposite idea maximizing the other aspects of a miner
I have done that timer death travel a lot. Basic idea is to set up different delay on every spawn locations and go when they come online. You only need like 10 second window every 1-2 minutes for respawn and it also help save battery on some basic stations.
Im happy to see someone who has embraced function over aesthetics as well I have a ship thats rather similar, 3x3 profile and long with a jump drive Main difference is that mine is hydro propulsion so it can function on planets too but it doesnt have any production aside from an H2/O2 gen Id suggest you look into making an H2 version as well, gives it even more functionality. And I dont even call mine a miner, I call it a "workship" because you can just change the tools at the front to whatever you need But I do like your ship a lot I approve it as a real survival design
I like to setup the gyroscope to override and bind the "override on/off" to the hotbar so the ship doesn't spin in any direction. I do this because I've seen my miner moving a bit when the drills are spinning. This miner (one reason is this being a large grid, I assume) doesn't seem to be affected that much by the drills. But small grid miners move a lot more. So when I imagine turning your ship into a small grid for the early game and combining your thruster setup with my gyroscope "technique" it would work out (as long as your ship can be converted to small grid with all or most of the features). I'll try it :D Great video! And great job at putting this together! Subscribed and thumbs up! I wanna see more! Have a great one!
"Best" seems to have a lot of limits tides mostly due to the current state of the game. Back when I last played before the whole CPU limits and drill count limit I would make massive miner that had and 11x11 grid with drills on it that could mine out whole roids extremely quickly. It had 8 refineries it with 8 assemblers and it could mine right through the asteroid like yours. It was before jump drives so the long time out to the roid as to stay protected hiding in space was the best way so being about 20-30 minute flight away from roids means you want to make a big haul. After like 1-2 hours mining would take several hours to process it all and best part it could be done on ship. The other cool think was drills were on a connector so I could detach them. :) Then attach on large grid of welders. Thus quick swap out miner goes to builder. ;) I like to go big and 5 drill limit is cringy. Even my starter miners would have more than that. Not sure I could really get back into SE with those kind of limits. Not even sure what sort of CPU count my ships would have in the system.
Maaan, I absolutely love this and will be building it from scratch. Thank you for spending such an incredible amount of time on it and then sharing. I do, however, have one question. Am I correct in assuming that there is a line of conveyors down the middle? It seems to make sense to me. Whoops! Nvm. I see the assembler in there now, sorry.
The design is sound overall, but I recommend an outer frame of heavy armor that has angled edges to prevent getting stuck. The heavy armor provides bump resistance so incidental contact won't damage your ship, and the angled edges prevent you from getting stuck if you have to back out. I did this with great effect using my small-grid Advanced Miner, and there is no reason it cannot be scaled up. I won't be a dick and leech off your views by linking it unless you give me permission, and it's an older design (I last updated it in 2019 but nothing that would affect it has changed since then) but the basic concepts can be easily applied to other miners.
@@SpIattercaster Don't even try. As of Automatons (but certainly not just _since_ Automatons), they're still snapping like crazy. Worse, the spinny bit at the tip of the drill gets stuck in rock when you hit the rock faster than ~20 m/s, but only for subgridded drills, weirdly enough. You can make an asteroid look like a pin cushion that is sure to make server admins very happy with the physics load so caused.
back in the days when I still played the game my favorite designs used the bare essential to keep the ship small and had a support craft outside the asteroid for extra storage and long range travel, bringing everything with you all the time always seemed inefficient, not sure if with the limitations now a days such design would be illegals or not, haven't played in quite a while
A bit lengthy but a very nice mining ship. I love the deatailed features which appear very useful. However I was wondering how you are producing oxygen when this is supposed to be a backup base/starting point.
Nice catch! I actually forgot to mention the o2 generator, it's in the middle of the sideways thrusters. I misspoke when I said it's just cargo in there, it's 1 cargo and the o2gen.
Woo, I was scrolling the comments before asking about oxygen myself. Glad you did cause now I have an instant answer! @Splattercaster This design is nuts man. Nice job.
I've been playing over 5000 hrs and in my experience I would just leave refineries on a station because they use to much power and invest in a second jump drive and having a antenna helps with ore detector range. But that's my experience.
you can get 6 drills per person on keen servers if you project them. you will be able to place all 6 with hand welder but the 6th will require a welding block to weld it past functional. Also conveyors and small cargo use same pcu, so use small cargo instead of conveyors.
Very interesting about the drills, I have to check that out. Yeah this build doesn't have any actual conveyor blocks, just cargo. I just meant it has conveyance across the entire grid. Thanks for the hot tip about drills though!
effective and its not gonna be to material demanding in comparison to the other mining ships i have found i love its mechanics too i will use this myself
If you can get 9 drills on a grid, I would suggest instead going with a 3x3 diamond array. The drills have enough radius to cover the space between blocks when checkerboarded, creating a nice smooth diamond shaped tunnel without the little edges that squared drills leave behind. This leaves room for a light, camera and detector right on the front while also giving you a bit more room to build wider and taller. If you're patient and can move with some finesse, you might consider using a rotary drill. Putting drills on two or four arms with a rotor allows you to greatly expand your drilling radius with minimal drills, though it does require you mine slowly and allow the drill to complete its revolution before moving so you don't snap the arm off.
Yep, I've used that design too, it's absolutely larger and more effective. Why don't I stick with it? Superstition perhaps, or maybe I just like the cleaner lines. Also I suspect the solid pattern drills faster, although faster isn't really the right word; more thoroughly. It's hard to put into words but a solid drill head seems to reach its maximum tunnel aperture quicker than staggered. This is just a suspicion of mine, I haven't really tested it. But you're right, a 9 drill checkerboard meets all the same constraints while producing more ore. See my pinned comment about the rotor setup. It's 100% a valid way to go but between Clang and requiring patience, it's just not for me. Cheers!
The only piece of info I can give is that when you are erasing voxels with right click, you can actually press I from inventory as you right click, when you close your inventory, your drills will continue to do the erasing without you needing to press the right click. You can set it up to do an .. auto erase or something.
True, it might be a bit beyond the scope of this miner, but you're absolutely right. I have an old blueprint of a bunch of jump drives, thrusters, and some landing gear cobbled together for exactly this purpose. I call it the Jump Dolly.
"This is the closest thing you can get to automated mining without scripts" I built years a go a miner that went through an asteroid then turned around until it detected voxel and went through again until cargo was full then it went home (tried but usually stucked cus pathfinding...) it all operated by timers.
If you create a faction, you can increase the number of drills you can use on vanilla servers. Even if there's no one else in the faction, you'll be able to have a lie higher allowance of stuff
Its a nice design, but I would probably go in a different direction for the role of the ship. I would have a larger mining command/refinery type ship with maybe a pair of the miners docking side by side. That would free up the ship to be specialised to just mining and not need the other modules. As a single ship miner though it looks like it works well.
Yeah, I know about those, but they lack the ability to differentiate ore from stone, as well as greater complexity. I should have been more specific in my description though, because you're right.
@@SpIattercaster Not to mention asteroid eaters. lol Personally I can't go past a PAM autominer lately. But I miss figuring out sensors, something about those things coming to life.. Hasn't been topped.
Something I recall doing a long time back was setting a gyro overide to slowly rotate me as I dig through. Though, it wasn't out of knowing the tiny voxel thing you're talking about. I used miners in a line. Still, might be the trick to use for this setup.
Its a very nice looking schip. Tip put you drills on a advanced rotor and let it rotate 5 drills is more then you will ever need you can even create a bigger schip.
@@tommya16 No worries at all! Everyone has preferences for how they get the job done, that's the beauty of Space Engineers. I just don't use Clang blocks unless I'm breaking the game intentionally.... hint hint wink wink.
@@SpIattercaster i can understand. I like the different types too. like me if i did pcu limited build miner. i would build a different schip, with the same limitations you got. For example: 1 grid means that i would got gyro override/overdrive for ship spin. drills in 1 line. pcu very limited would mean i want 1 big thrister on 6 side (1small thruster is same pcu as 1 large) short range flying ship. hour max. and probably 3 a 4 large cargo containers. Aka totally different ship type. 😆😉
Hey! I love this miner. I recently built it for my survival world and made a few modifications so I could enter the moons gravity with 1M kg gross ship weight without blowing up. I'd love to share my design with you and see what you think!
The most efficient drill layout for 8 drills is NDNNN NNDND NDNDN DNDNN NNMDN N=nothing D =drill This will give you a tunnel big enough for 5x5 ship with with 45 degree corner blocks for the corners its best to use wheel blocks at the same level as the drill to act as a bumper
Interesting, I have a better (than the one in the vid) design with 9 drill heads but yours intrigues me. I went for compact partially to help with the ship's silhouette.
nice though on offical servers I usually just slap those drills onto the starting vehicle with a rotor like other people have been saying. saves a lot of time when starting off. when I starting building I then swap the drills for welders and construct my main ship (which mines with far more storage but not as deep) I also tend to never use ion thrusters because of a few reasons - hard to find uranium and refine it - much weaker thrust (and don't work on planets) - because I use ice power anyways they are actually less efficient then hydrogen (ions are 1028.6 N/L vs hydrogen's 1,344.38 N/L) overall when I'm starting I don't have the uranium or platinum for ions and late game hydrogen is easier to get and makes my ship go faster per PCU
Hehe that 3x3 design who can dig into asteroids. I had the same design, but with only Hydro thrusters, so it also can operate on Planets. And as someone who played almost 3000 hours, mostly building and testing, i say. You need more stone ejecter. i think i had 1ejecter for 2 drills. then you can go 100% all the time, and it will never fill up with stone. But that gravity generator to push stones away and the Autospawn kill switch, are next level to me. never thought about it. Even tho, i had a fully gravity generator driven Spaceship once ^^ So undersand what you can do with those things 🤣 And this is absolute absurd... it was one of my biggest ships i EVER had. and it also had the best exeleration with 0 to 100 in a split second haha.
Hey. i see the design and the flaw in vanilla. i can see a fix for vanilla. A Rotating head might do the trick to fix those pesky remains
Yep, enough people have mentioned the rotating head that I probably should have addressed it in the video originally. My experience with rotating heads has been rocky, puns aside, I have had numerous issues with their use. I haven't used them since the major physics rework, but I am wary of trying again. Any time rotors or other moving parts are entered into the equation, clang has an open door to your build. I keep my miners "solid state" simply to reduce failure points to a minimum, at the cost of a little convenience and/or ore output.
@@SpIattercaster ahh okay. I see. there are other ways. But they may be hard or easy to install.
Example 1 is a rotating head.
Example 2 Overridden gyro that spins at a certain rate.
These 2 are ways to fix that
That I know of
yep, you could go with a 'TBM' style of ship too, using 5x5 hull design, and landing gears with pistons, but in space, i would just go with the rotor 5x1 drill setup.
i also build it without refiners, and just make it dock with a mothership. just replace the refiners with 2 large cargo containers. unless you have about 8 upgraded refiners, or on a non 1x server, it takes a while to refine anyways, so you can just cruse around rock to rock.
i also just make my mining ship battery powered with a single small reactor for emergencies. much cheaper and easy to fix. just make sure you have survival station on it and your golden. I usually also have a armory with a drill, weapon, tools, and ammo incase you somehow die. you can even stuff a small H2 tank and O2 tank on it, just so that its a standalone mining ship/escape craft if your main ship gets exploded.
Or PAM
100% Function, 0% Bling.
It so unapologetically hideous, but seems to work great - i love it.
if you build like this normally you dont end up wasting 800 hours trying to get here in the first place
Hideous?! How dare you. It has the unsophisticated beaty of a master laborer.
after only ~500 hours in game this is one of the most impressive deep space miners i have ever seen
Thanks. There is a wide variety of designs people have come up with to tackle the challenges of space and this is just my current best for the parameters I mentioned.
I usually go for huge rigs with 7x7 spaced drills.
But this is the best functionality to pcu ratio I've ever seen. Makes my chonkers seem very inefficient.
Though there's something nice about being on a friend's server and mining 10 million ore in one go
check out large grid mining ship 552 on the workshop
@@albiorix9645 yep, this is the best mining ship, not sure it needs to be in heavy armour though.
This chonker replaced most of my own builds. Shame the author gave it no description and didn't include its name ("Bore") in the listing..
Only
The purity of the design is a thing of beauty. Truly this is engineering, essentials no waste.
Thanks!
I've utilized some of the building techniques that you've shown here, like the thruster placement and narrow profile for efficient through-mining, yet they weren't anywhere near as thoughtfully and elegantly built as your mining rig here! I'll definitely be utilizing this design during my next space survival playthrough.
Thanks for the nice comment! I hope my years of trial and error can save you time and energy. Enjoy!
A quick tip for the right click destroy/erase voxel: if you right-click the drills then go in the inventory of the ship, release the right button only in the inventory of the ship, then the drills will keep on being in destruction mode even when you are no longer in the ship inventory menu. It will stop if you right-click and release again or get out of the cockpit. I find this useful when I want to drill long tunnels and not constantly pressing the right buttons for long periods of time.
Awesome, thanks.
It’s the most breathtakingly beautiful design I’ve ever seen in space engineers. I was just searching for large scale excavation methods for an underground base, and this definitely isn’t that, but I’m immensely pleased with what I found instead
Thanks for the kind words, I hope you find the method you're looking for!
Glad to see someone else using timer blocks to respawn TP. Nice miner, looks great and I will be using. So thankful you have uploaded a NO DLC version. Great work, thanks for the time that was clearly invested in learning all of these techniques and folding them into one Maximus Miner
Painfully simple but the brilliance beind it is just amazing. A truly efficient, perfect machine.
Well done sir.
Thank you Cringe Lord, you're a beautiful human. It only cost my relationship, my career, my house and pets. Worth it.
@@SpIattercaster no great strides have been made without great sacrifice.
For utility work, I do like to have more braking thrust than forward thrust. Makes them a little bit easier to control, especially when in full load. Nevertheless, a wonderful design!
I totally understand, nothing like flying past your destination at 70m/s and regretting your previous decisions lol. This ship is pretty slow to accel/decel when you are fully loaded. It was a compromise I made for less PCU and a more compact design. Thanks for the comment.
I love seeing people perfect their designs and creating the most efficient crafts they can
Agreed. This design just fits my requirements perfectly, it may not for others. It's a personal best, not "the best".
Well, I didn't find that boring, at all. I love this format of talking through the design. Wish more RUclipsrs did it.
Yeeting stone away with a grav gen is cool and something I hadn't thought of but I usually build small grid miners that launch from a carrier. I may have to try this.
Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it. I have a lot more Space Engineers content I could share, plenty of evil stuff too like how to triangulate player locations, abuse safe zones, and my massively overpowered vanilla clang drive. Some people don't want that info shared though.
Nice miner design and i learned some tricks for my next large grid miner :) Many thanks for sharing
Sure thing! I hope it makes a difference.
I made a similar design 2 years ago.
But it was a remote-controlled miner, using small blocks.
This is an effective and efficient design for large scale mining. I like it. Nice job!
man, ive been trying to figure out how to streamline a miner behind its drills for 5 years, thank you, i will be putting this build to heavy use
I hope it meets your expectations and serves you well :)
Ahh, love the complete function over looks, just how I like it
I really like your design well done. I'm new to all this, the drill tip was actually so useful I always find myself with so much stone I don't need 😭
I hope it serves you well!
Interior turrets also make for good rotating cameras. As you travel through space you can zoom in on passing asteroids to see if they might have an ore on the surface, and you can do this without having to move the entire ship using just a static camera.
Great point, very true.
I made a similar one a while ago, but on hydrogen. It wasn't self-sufficient or anything, in terms of refining/crafting, but I had a O2/H2 generator, a hydrogen generator for charging the onboard battery, a large container and 4 drills. Later I realized the potential and expanded it to 30-ish drills, and it's a beast, that also clips the audio, which sounds very unpleasant. Note that I only play singleplayer, so some features here are completely useless to me, which means the miner can be that much more compact in my case, and I am willing to spend 7 minutes getting back from an asteroid to my base, which is definitely not an excuse to not have a jumpdrive...
Yours is much more refined, and the forward/backwards thruster placement is indeed genius, good job!
You have done Gods work good sir. Anyone who has played this game has run into mining issues. Thank you!
Wow, this is such a clean and utilitarian setup. I'm not very good at building ships even after almost 700 hours 😅 so seeing this kind of "simple" ship being so functional and well built is really awesome!
Thanks. Simplicity is beautiful. Then again, complexity sure looks cool, at least in SE.
@@SpIattercaster also, I never knew drills had the same terrain "deleting" feature that the hand drill does. I really appreciate the time spent explaining the build. It really helps me apply the same principles and ideas into my own builds. Really top notch video
man i saw this video very early playing this game and i've made dozens of ships based off this design lol. good stuff.
That's awesome, thanks for sharing. My long-overdue hydrogen version will debut soon BTW. It was made at roughly the same time as this one but I never got around to making a video. Cheers!
Great explanation of your ship! Well thought out, and thank you for the hows and whys! Most people just give you a tour but not the logistics! Great job!
certainly has all the bells and whistles you could possibly want on a miner. definitely well thought out. a bit too all encompassing for my tastes though. best miner design i had was a dedicated atmospheric minor with tomes of storage. later on i put hydro thrusters on it but definitely did the trick.
I’ve made a similar miner, it had a big drilling head, was hydrogen powered, hauled 3 large cargo containers, had a refinery, a jump drive, a reactor, even an assembler for field repairs, it served great on the server I played on until the server died... it even had ports for basic defensive weaponry
Wow! What a great design. Minimal but fully functional and then some. I’ll definitely be borrowing of your ideas. Great work.
Great design. Can't wait to try and replicate it and have mine morph into a giant pos. I really glad I caught that timer block tip!!!!
Using timer blocks to get round the resplendent system is genius, I never would have thought of that!
This is quite literally the first ship I ever built on my own in space engineers. I didn't have the jump drive camera or respawn teleporter. I also didn't have the stone ejector since I actually processed all of it. I didn't deem it necessary for respawning since I had the Ibis respawn shuttle. I did lose the ship because while I was mining the ibis was destroyed and I suffocated because I didn't think to add an o2h2 generator and couldn't find where my ice went in time. I also used 3rd person indeed of camera and had an extra drill there.
I legit thought everyone would have something similar and thought my ship was nothing special. It's just common sense to make big mining drill for asteroids. But everyone had all these small automated drones for that back when scrips were the only way to automate. My big drill when I rebuild didn't like the code and just flew away infinitely so once I caught up and brought it back to my new base I just disassembled it for parts because automated mining was everything back then.
I particularly like the indented forward and reverse thrusters to keep your profile fitting neatly behind the drills.
Thanks! I thought it looked pretty cool and was perfect for my minimalist designs.
Holy shit dude. Been looking for a design like this for a long time. This thing is awesome
Thanks, I hope it works for you!
@@SpIattercaster oh I will. What I was looking for overall.
Saw lots of really cool yet humongous refinery factory ships but the core components are pretty spread out and so you have to practically build the whole ship before you can use it to help build itself.
small grid miners are a dime a dozen but cannot carry the assembler/refinery
Never really saw anything in between to get me to the big builds. All the tutorials say 'build a base and build a mining ship'
By the time I got a refinery I would be visited by hostile mobs and be forced to abandon my fresh built refinery in favor of my small grid miner and I was back to my survival kit.
That only happened once but I've been leery about building stationary defenseless bases ever since.
I might use your design to come up with my own version.
I personally wouldn't design like this BUT I do like the gravity generator idea, that's a nifty idea and I will be using that: good call.
Your miner is one of the most efficient designs that I have seen. It definitely looks like it will get the job done.
Just in case it happens to you where only one drill or weapon works.
There is a little known command and that's the MMB. I believe it's for (for example) when you have two weapons on your ship and only want to fire one for whatever reason.
I'm sure it could be used for other purposes as well.
I use the left click (Harvest) and right click (Excavate) method to clear out the stone from around the ore deposits as well.
I've used your system to mine, with good success but sometimes also with mixed results.
When the drills "bumped" into the yet to be mined material, the speed would drop and it would eventually come to a stop.
My semi-automatic mining system differs from yours because of this reason.
I have a fleet of mining drones equipped with, besides the necessary equipment, a sensor, two timer blocks and a extra small thruster set on override in the back.
I call them worms because they go through asteroids like worms through apples.
It works in this manner. The sensor detects the asteroid and starts what I call the pulse timer.
The timer has three commands. One is to turn the drills on. then turn On/Off the pulse thruster and the last one is to restart the timer.
When the asteroid is detected the pulse timer turns the pulse thruster on for a few seconds to get the miner moving at around .50 ms and then shuts it off. the drills gently bumps into the asteroid and mines a chunk out. By that time the timer repeats and pushes the miner further into the tunnel.
The second timer is for canceling the mining. If coming out the other side and the sensor no longer detects the asteroid and just shuts off the pulse thruster, the pulse timer will just fire it up again.
If it stops the pulse timer, the pulse thruster may be on and it'll just keep going.
The sensor also triggers the second timer which stops the pulse timer, turns off the pulse thruster and turns off the drills.
After that I just clear the drone from the asteroid and set it's auto pilot to head back to base.
Other than to check on the drone's mining progress from time to time and to dock it in its docking port when it returns, it is pretty much a hands free operation.
One thing that I don't understand is that the sensors will detect "asteroid" voxels but doesn't detect "planet and moon" voxels, at least from my experience.
One might say that it is a hold back from the old days before planets but isn't a voxel a voxel?
I mean for all intent and purposes, isn't a planet just a big asteroid with different textures?
I used to use a miner almost exactly like that but I do a couple things differently now. I use the five drills in a straight row and do "rake" mining, as I only stop for surface deposits pretty much or right click if needed, and I employ the basic refineries for stone with sorters set in such a way so I can still use the full refinery with yield modules with stone, and I dump gravel instead of stone. It actually refines it faster than it mines it, and the ingots are very much worth it to me. I actually never mine iron, nickel, or silicon. ore because stone is so common, I get enough while mining cobalt, gold, silver, and uranium. So for me space engineers has like four ores, or five including ice lol. Another pro tip is I only use ice for H2, I get all my O2 from either farms, or a vent set to depressurize and suck it out of any planet except for the one moon. Makes H2 a bit cheaper, but I can easily use ice in emergencies. :) Hope these tips are interesting!
Im impressed of all the thoughts and experience that went into this. Big props.
Thanks :)
First: Excellent design, thanks a lot for sharing, we are still using one ship in your original design!!
Then I took your design, rebuilt it to H2 thrusters, replaced the refinery with tanks and more cargo. That makes the miner usable on moons up to 1mio kg total weight (of course it can't survive totally on its own in case of damages this way).
PS: Simply attaching a flying tank as ore detector makes exploration of asteroids a lot faster
Thanks! I would love to see your design. I have a hydrogen version of this that is undergoing final testing and I just haven't really had the time to push it out yet.
Absolutely amazing ship! Great job man
Thanks!!
First i was like "whats this after 8 years?" But i just didnt expect it to be practical and efficient to the max. After hearing your thoughts it quickly was obvious that this is not just a regular cube, its used a lot of knowledge and basically minimized everything else and it surely works perfectly as "insurance". I like that idea.
Its also a good example for new players for what is possible to do.
Thanks, I didn't spend 8 years exclusively refining this design of course, rather I amended it many times during that time frame. It's just the culmination of the designs of many similar miners that lived and died in survival.
@@SpIattercaster sooooo many clones spat out of the medbay. :D
After a 1000h in game, I also have designed my fully self-sufficient miner, but I focused more on the design rather than functionality.
I often use the respawn trick to travel, although my timer block is always on and it just loops, so when I need to respawn, I only have to turn the survival kit off, and I know for sure that the timer block will turn it back on eventually.
Good design, my favorite miner has always been the same, a 3x3 bore drill, but never used a refinery on it, this is ingenious, mine was just 9drills + 20small ions per side + cockpit, ore detector, 2gyros, 4smallreactors, surv kit + 1large cargo + 6small ions (reverse) + top/bottom connectors + 3small ions, 1 large ion. No conveyors, just 1 large cargo and small cargos.
Good job. 👍👍👍
This reminds me of my drill ship Glassy. Its 3x3 like yours, but a bit smaller and simply made. It has a h2\o2 gen, spherical grav gen, 1 small reactor, a few small cargos, and 1 large cargo. It is due for an upgrade and I was thinking of adding a survival kit to it. Oh, the reason it is called Glassy is because I put glass all over it to act as armor to protect it as I drill and bump around. Last update however has changed something and now the large cargo seems to take damage any time I bump any part near the front. I think my new version will have armor plates rather than glass. I recommend doing something similar to yours, especially on a server. You never know when Lag and Clang will throw a party on your grid
Question if I may. The drill heads clear a specific area per drill, so you can place the drills apart one drill width. If you did that, you could remove the four center drills in between the corner drills, thus making it as effectively efficient and reduce cost and weight, yes? I am two weeks old and still have a LOT to learn of course. Thank you kindly for any responses, tips and or recommendations.
I found out that you can add status lights next to the cockpit and have them come on when your cargo container and or drills are full. You want a light to come on (yellow or preferred color) when the cargo container is full and a light to come on when the drills are full. That way you won’t waste ore by trying to monitor your weight as a guesstimate of when to stop drilling. Anyway, take care, be safe and I love the design. I am currently building a base and learning the ins and outs. It will be a while before I get to space and hopefully land on a moon, planets or asteroids to go on further adventures. Take care! 😇😎🫡
reminds me of one i made very simular . i made it 5x5 the main stuff was 3x3 like yours but it was covered in heavy blocks all the way around for added protectionmaking it 5x5. used it on a very hostile server. very nicely done . and its funny becuase it also took me a while to come to the worm miner setup as well.
Really like the design. i made a ship in this kinda theme but went with 6 thrusters in a messy random placement. I went with 5 drills and just have it rotate to deal with the voxels that poke into the hole I'm drilling. Never thought of using the gravity gen. will definitely try that out. Thanks for sharing this, makes me want to go clean up my design. lol
Thanks, it makes me happy when people are able to take these ideas and run.
18:36 then you can put a collector at the end of your tunnel so you can get all of the stuff from the stone your mining
That's interesting. I thought the same thing, although I haven't a clue as to how that would be efficiently built.
I have a trick I use when controlling the drills with the mouse: if you enter into the ship’s menu while holding down the button, the drills will continue to work without holding down the button and they will keep working until you exit out of the menu _and_ click a mouse button, or when you leave the cockpit. I use this when controlling one of my stationary mining rigs with multiple pistons, rotors, and hinges. With this ship, you could use it along with your “cruise control” to auto-clear a bunch of voxel.
Awesome video dude , great job, 😎👍
I wouldn't have believed when you said 8 years of experience until I watched the whole video
If you are collecting a large amount of stone and it clogs the queue, it will start refining stone. Make it so that its whitelisted to eject gravel too
I've never thought of using the grav gen to toss the stone further before. Now I'll be incorporating it into my builds.
You can quickly and easily modify it to work with 2, maybe 3 drills by giving it a rotating head. A 5 drill head would be gravy ! 4 outer, 1 center and youll have some wiggle room in the tunnel with your miner. I imagine its got enough mass behind it to keep it from locking up and turning the ship. I think I would at least cover it in plates or huge sheets of glass though (since apparently its a good armor) and sneak in some stratigic welders to keep it fixed to prevent wiggle damages to the importaint bits. Another thing you can do is route the stone into basic refineries instead of ejectors to maximize your haul.
Awesome ship. I can't wait to use some of your ideas. One thing I would do personally is to put a conveyor sorter between your main connector and conveyor system and set it to blacklist nothing, so you don't accidentally drain all the stone off your connected grid if you forget to turn off your garbage sorter. But I tend to mine a lot of stone in my bases so that may not be useful to anyone but me.
If you have your SK timer always on and counting then there's no risk of forgetting it when switching SK off. Good mining design, very clean and has everything you need. It's the perfect starter ship.
True, I think the reason I switched back from that method is that you don't know where in the cycle the timer is when you go to turn the medbay off, and after enough false respawns I got sick of it. If the timer loop is long enough it should be a rare occurrence though. Here's a question: does the grid de-render and stop the timer from reactivating the medbay? My gut tells me know but experience tells me this may have been a problem in the past in SE.
@TheSplattercaster I never tried it with a Medbay but I can't see why it wouldn't work normally...
Sorry, I used the term medbay interchangeably with survival kit. They function exactly the same in regards to spawning the character. My point is both ways of using the timer block have a pitfall. With the manual toggle, you can forget to toggle it. With the automatic toggle you don't know when the SK is turning back on, and might need to backspace more than once. Not a huge deal but it was enough of an annoyance that I went back to the manual toggle. Play around with it and you'll see what I mean.
@@SpIattercaster yes that's true. I normally have a 1 minute delay. It's plenty to re-respawn
Your mine craft skill know no bounds
Not bad dude. For the auto respawn if you backspace suicide twice in a row you will go the to respawn screen.
Yep. I said "I should make a video on that", and I actually did, it covers that tactic as well and how to use it to travel. Cheers.
I love your "No Nonsense" approach. Do you have a PRE-Nuclear similar style drilling rig? I'm doing my first fully-true Survival playthrough and I'm looking to build my first Asteroid Miner. I love your elegant and simplistic design!
I did a similar miner, less advanced (no jump nor cruise, well manual cruise) but with an array of ejectors in the back as a deffensive weapon, giving a spacial delectable new meaning to "eat my dust" for undesired followers. But, yeah, I made it way too big (solo), what can I say, I was bored of boring so I made my mouth bigger. I also included a projector that has a scale of 5 blocks units (red-white), 100 blocks long, and that is a size of the ship frame, cage, so I can plan efficiently the entry points and avoid overlapsing, even the exit point. This game is way too fun. Now I need a better computer to use my miner, yep!
Dunno why i’m getting so many Space Engineer videos, but i’m loving this. Also, love the design
Thanks :)
I used to build this type of miner all the time back in the day. Though I would make it SUUUUUUPER long. Lots of onboard refineries, blast furnaces, and assemblers.
I like to cover it in glass "Armor". Slightly less clangtastic, but more importantly it makes it shiny!
8 years for a starting miner? Good job!
This is an absolute beauty :O
Any advice for building mega drills like this? I’d like to learn how to make a version of this fitted to my needs since I feel a little bad about copy-pasting other folk’s designs
Note: "Official" servers and "vanilla" servers are not the same thing. This ship is buildable by one player on any non-Keen vanilla server.
Interesting. Most miners I make are based off the main idea of my original "explorer" ship using hydrogen and a not so good drill output, cause its designed to be able to survive combat. I play on lots of more "modded" servers with a 13 drill limit and more centralized mining zones. Nice to see an exact opposite idea maximizing the other aspects of a miner
I have done that timer death travel a lot. Basic idea is to set up different delay on every spawn locations and go when they come online. You only need like 10 second window every 1-2 minutes for respawn and it also help save battery on some basic stations.
Im happy to see someone who has embraced function over aesthetics as well
I have a ship thats rather similar, 3x3 profile and long with a jump drive
Main difference is that mine is hydro propulsion so it can function on planets too but it doesnt
have any production aside from an H2/O2 gen
Id suggest you look into making an H2 version as well, gives it even more functionality.
And I dont even call mine a miner, I call it a "workship" because you can just change the tools at the front to whatever you need
But I do like your ship a lot I approve it as a real survival design
Thanks for the comment! I love these minimalist-yet-functional designs. I do have a hydrogen version that I was planning to upload as well.
@@SpIattercaster if you upload ill check it out for sure
It can still be aesthetic if you add armorplates in different colors and textures
When right click mining, press I for the info panel and let go. It right click mines until you stop it.
I like to setup the gyroscope to override and bind the "override on/off" to the hotbar so the ship doesn't spin in any direction. I do this because I've seen my miner moving a bit when the drills are spinning. This miner (one reason is this being a large grid, I assume) doesn't seem to be affected that much by the drills. But small grid miners move a lot more.
So when I imagine turning your ship into a small grid for the early game and combining your thruster setup with my gyroscope "technique" it would work out (as long as your ship can be converted to small grid with all or most of the features). I'll try it :D
Great video! And great job at putting this together! Subscribed and thumbs up!
I wanna see more!
Have a great one!
Awesome tip, thanks. I always just made myself not bump the mouse, but I'll give the gyro override method a try! Cheers :)
@@SpIattercaster Can recommend flipping the mouse up-side down.
"Best" seems to have a lot of limits tides mostly due to the current state of the game. Back when I last played before the whole CPU limits and drill count limit I would make massive miner that had and 11x11 grid with drills on it that could mine out whole roids extremely quickly. It had 8 refineries it with 8 assemblers and it could mine right through the asteroid like yours. It was before jump drives so the long time out to the roid as to stay protected hiding in space was the best way so being about 20-30 minute flight away from roids means you want to make a big haul. After like 1-2 hours mining would take several hours to process it all and best part it could be done on ship.
The other cool think was drills were on a connector so I could detach them. :) Then attach on large grid of welders. Thus quick swap out miner goes to builder. ;)
I like to go big and 5 drill limit is cringy. Even my starter miners would have more than that. Not sure I could really get back into SE with those kind of limits. Not even sure what sort of CPU count my ships would have in the system.
You can just turn off PCU
@@kerbalairforce8802 You can't change the settings on someone else's server.
nice, simple, i added one layer of heavy plates to protect and a magnet under (always help to lock something or somewhere)
Nice functional concept !
Maaan, I absolutely love this and will be building it from scratch. Thank you for spending such an incredible amount of time on it and then sharing. I do, however, have one question. Am I correct in assuming that there is a line of conveyors down the middle? It seems to make sense to me. Whoops! Nvm. I see the assembler in there now, sorry.
Thanks for the nice comment. Yes, there's a cargo container and the oxygen gen that I forgot to mention down the middle of the thrusters.
@@SpIattercaster ohhh, okay. It seems I mistook some blocks. Thank you for the quick reply. 🤜🤛
I just wanna thank you again. This build is DOPE!
The design is sound overall, but I recommend an outer frame of heavy armor that has angled edges to prevent getting stuck. The heavy armor provides bump resistance so incidental contact won't damage your ship, and the angled edges prevent you from getting stuck if you have to back out. I did this with great effect using my small-grid Advanced Miner, and there is no reason it cannot be scaled up. I won't be a dick and leech off your views by linking it unless you give me permission, and it's an older design (I last updated it in 2019 but nothing that would affect it has changed since then) but the basic concepts can be easily applied to other miners.
Sure, you can link it here :)
I would love to, but RUclips suddenly has decided to delete my comments two seconds after I post them regardless of their contents.
@@WardenWolf That's strange... well I see this one :P
1:25 having them on an advanced rotor can be used to compensate for the sides getting hit, you'd just have to move a bit slower
True, I've had issues with rotors ...snapping off. But that was before the major physics rework, and you're still totally right.
@@SpIattercaster Don't even try. As of Automatons (but certainly not just _since_ Automatons), they're still snapping like crazy. Worse, the spinny bit at the tip of the drill gets stuck in rock when you hit the rock faster than ~20 m/s, but only for subgridded drills, weirdly enough. You can make an asteroid look like a pin cushion that is sure to make server admins very happy with the physics load so caused.
back in the days when I still played the game my favorite designs used the bare essential to keep the ship small and had a support craft outside the asteroid for extra storage and long range travel, bringing everything with you all the time always seemed inefficient, not sure if with the limitations now a days such design would be illegals or not, haven't played in quite a while
haha friend came into server saying he build a miner i immediately recognized it as the one you built :P
That's awesome, thanks for sharing. I never would have guessed this many people would see my miner and end up using it. Cheers!
A bit lengthy but a very nice mining ship. I love the deatailed features which appear very useful. However I was wondering how you are producing oxygen when this is supposed to be a backup base/starting point.
Nice catch! I actually forgot to mention the o2 generator, it's in the middle of the sideways thrusters. I misspoke when I said it's just cargo in there, it's 1 cargo and the o2gen.
Woo, I was scrolling the comments before asking about oxygen myself. Glad you did cause now I have an instant answer! @Splattercaster This design is nuts man. Nice job.
I've been playing over 5000 hrs and in my experience I would just leave refineries on a station because they use to much power and invest in a second jump drive and having a antenna helps with ore detector range. But that's my experience.
you can get 6 drills per person on keen servers if you project them. you will be able to place all 6 with hand welder but the 6th will require a welding block to weld it past functional. Also conveyors and small cargo use same pcu, so use small cargo instead of conveyors.
Very interesting about the drills, I have to check that out. Yeah this build doesn't have any actual conveyor blocks, just cargo. I just meant it has conveyance across the entire grid. Thanks for the hot tip about drills though!
@@SpIattercaster yeah you said cargo through the center of the thrusters, I was just adding the cargo vs conveyer block for other viewers benefits.
effective and its not gonna be to material demanding in comparison to the other mining ships i have found i love its mechanics too i will use this myself
If you can get 9 drills on a grid, I would suggest instead going with a 3x3 diamond array. The drills have enough radius to cover the space between blocks when checkerboarded, creating a nice smooth diamond shaped tunnel without the little edges that squared drills leave behind. This leaves room for a light, camera and detector right on the front while also giving you a bit more room to build wider and taller.
If you're patient and can move with some finesse, you might consider using a rotary drill. Putting drills on two or four arms with a rotor allows you to greatly expand your drilling radius with minimal drills, though it does require you mine slowly and allow the drill to complete its revolution before moving so you don't snap the arm off.
Yep, I've used that design too, it's absolutely larger and more effective. Why don't I stick with it? Superstition perhaps, or maybe I just like the cleaner lines. Also I suspect the solid pattern drills faster, although faster isn't really the right word; more thoroughly. It's hard to put into words but a solid drill head seems to reach its maximum tunnel aperture quicker than staggered. This is just a suspicion of mine, I haven't really tested it. But you're right, a 9 drill checkerboard meets all the same constraints while producing more ore.
See my pinned comment about the rotor setup. It's 100% a valid way to go but between Clang and requiring patience, it's just not for me. Cheers!
The only piece of info I can give is that when you are erasing voxels with right click, you can actually press I from inventory as you right click, when you close your inventory, your drills will continue to do the erasing without you needing to press the right click. You can set it up to do an .. auto erase or something.
Whoa, I had no idea! I'll give it a try, thanks. Sounds kinda like it's unintentional but hey, if the shoe fits, wear it.
A magnetic pad is worth having. They come in handy. It also lets you use the miner as a tug to jump other vehicles.
True, it might be a bit beyond the scope of this miner, but you're absolutely right. I have an old blueprint of a bunch of jump drives, thrusters, and some landing gear cobbled together for exactly this purpose. I call it the Jump Dolly.
Well done.
"This is the closest thing you can get to automated mining without scripts"
I built years a go a miner that went through an asteroid then turned around until it detected voxel and went through again until cargo was full then it went home (tried but usually stucked cus pathfinding...) it all operated by timers.
Sleek design! Could be handy for building a base inside an asteroid for sure.
If you create a faction, you can increase the number of drills you can use on vanilla servers. Even if there's no one else in the faction, you'll be able to have a lie higher allowance of stuff
Is it enough to place the 8 needed for this design? If so that would be amazing!
Great vid. Thanks.
reminds me of my pioneer class of all-in-one survival ships
@18:20 OMG You just shown me how to create inertia bombs against enemy installations free of retaliation.(I think). The gravity generator is key.
Fantastic design!!!
Its a nice design, but I would probably go in a different direction for the role of the ship. I would have a larger mining command/refinery type ship with maybe a pair of the miners docking side by side. That would free up the ship to be specialised to just mining and not need the other modules. As a single ship miner though it looks like it works well.
Closest auto miner without scripts? Seen the autominers made years ago with timers and sensors? Seen entire asteroids cleared with those.
Yeah, I know about those, but they lack the ability to differentiate ore from stone, as well as greater complexity. I should have been more specific in my description though, because you're right.
@@SpIattercaster Not to mention asteroid eaters. lol
Personally I can't go past a PAM autominer lately. But I miss figuring out sensors, something about those things coming to life.. Hasn't been topped.
I would put the cockpit in the rear end, easier to get in when inside a tunnel.
Something I recall doing a long time back was setting a gyro overide to slowly rotate me as I dig through. Though, it wasn't out of knowing the tiny voxel thing you're talking about. I used miners in a line.
Still, might be the trick to use for this setup.
Its a very nice looking schip. Tip put you drills on a advanced rotor and let it rotate 5 drills is more then you will ever need you can even create a bigger schip.
Thanks. I addressed the rotor thing in a different comment, but yeah I don't like moving parts because sooner or later Clang will take them.
@@SpIattercaster thats nice then if thats the case use gyro overdrive. its 1 grid.
i see that other post did that too. sorry for dubbeling up on that
@@tommya16 No worries at all! Everyone has preferences for how they get the job done, that's the beauty of Space Engineers. I just don't use Clang blocks unless I'm breaking the game intentionally.... hint hint wink wink.
@@SpIattercaster i can understand. I like the different types too. like me if i did pcu limited build miner. i would build a different schip, with the same limitations you got. For example: 1 grid means that i would got gyro override/overdrive for ship spin. drills in 1 line. pcu very limited would mean i want 1 big thrister on 6 side (1small thruster is same pcu as 1 large) short range flying ship. hour max. and probably 3 a 4 large cargo containers. Aka totally different ship type. 😆😉
this helped me very much, thank you
Hey! I love this miner. I recently built it for my survival world and made a few modifications so I could enter the moons gravity with 1M kg gross ship weight without blowing up. I'd love to share my design with you and see what you think!
The most efficient drill layout for 8 drills is
NDNNN
NNDND
NDNDN
DNDNN
NNMDN
N=nothing
D =drill
This will give you a tunnel big enough for 5x5 ship with with 45 degree corner blocks for the corners its best to use wheel blocks at the same level as the drill to act as a bumper
Interesting, I have a better (than the one in the vid) design with 9 drill heads but yours intrigues me. I went for compact partially to help with the ship's silhouette.
nice though on offical servers I usually just slap those drills onto the starting vehicle with a rotor like other people have been saying. saves a lot of time when starting off. when I starting building I then swap the drills for welders and construct my main ship (which mines with far more storage but not as deep)
I also tend to never use ion thrusters because of a few reasons
- hard to find uranium and refine it
- much weaker thrust (and don't work on planets)
- because I use ice power anyways they are actually less efficient then hydrogen (ions are 1028.6 N/L vs hydrogen's 1,344.38 N/L)
overall when I'm starting I don't have the uranium or platinum for ions and late game hydrogen is easier to get and makes my ship go faster per PCU
Hehe that 3x3 design who can dig into asteroids. I had the same design, but with only Hydro thrusters, so it also can operate on Planets. And as someone who played almost 3000 hours, mostly building and testing, i say. You need more stone ejecter. i think i had 1ejecter for 2 drills. then you can go 100% all the time, and it will never fill up with stone. But that gravity generator to push stones away and the Autospawn kill switch, are next level to me. never thought about it. Even tho, i had a fully gravity generator driven Spaceship once ^^ So undersand what you can do with those things 🤣 And this is absolute absurd... it was one of my biggest ships i EVER had. and it also had the best exeleration with 0 to 100 in a split second haha.