Big mining drill

The Big mining drill is the large electric mining drill used to extract ore and stone from resource patches. It requires electricity to operate and covers a larger area than smaller drills, summing the production from all resource tiles beneath it and placing mined resources directly on the ground or into adjacent containers and inserters without needing logistics robots. The drill has a front-mounted status light that indicates its operational condition: green when functioning normally, yellow when output is blocked, low on power, or disabled by the circuit network, and red when the drill has exhausted the resources under it or lacks a required mining fluid for the current resource.

Mining production is determined by a combination of the drill’s mining power and mining speed together with the resource’s hardness and mining time. The production rate on a tile is computed from the drill’s mining speed divided by the resource’s mining time (and more complete formulas combine mining power, resource hardness, and speed to produce a resource/sec value). The Big mining drill sums the production rate of every tile in its covered area and displays this total in its tooltip. Productivity research and productivity modules increase yields and modify these calculations; speed modules and beacon setups alter mining speed and thus change throughput.

Practical notes for use and placement:

• The Big mining drill covers a 5×5 mining area when placed correctly (its footprint is larger than some drills, so position it centrally over the deposit to maximize covered tiles).
• Place electric drills toward the center of a deposit to capture the maximum number of resource tiles; avoid placing them so that large portions of their 5×5 area lie off the patch.
• The drill outputs resources directly; you can place chests, furnaces, other drills or inserters adjacent to collect output without belts if desired.
• Monitor the front status light to quickly diagnose problems: yellow for blocked output, low power, or circuit disable; red if the patch is depleted or a required fluid is missing.
• When mining mixed deposits the drill sums contributions from each tile under it, so a single drill can exploit mixed-resource fields efficiently.
• Use productivity modules and beacons to increase yield per tile; combine speed modules to raise raw throughput when faster extraction is needed, balancing with power consumption and module effects.
• Hand-mining and tool-based mining follow related but distinct formulas; the drill’s fixed mining parameters differ from player mining rates and should be optimized via technology and modules rather than relying on manual mining.