block-mechanical-drill

The Mechanical Drill is a basic mining building used to extract primary ores from the ground. It is the entry-level drill: inexpensive, slow, and limited to the game's basic resource veins. When placed directly on an ore tile it will continuously produce that ore at a low rate until the vein is depleted or the drill is removed.

It is intended as an early-game solution to secure steady raw materials before upgrading to faster or more advanced drills. It cannot mine deep or rare resources; only basic ores are supported. Due to its low throughput, Mechanical Drills are most useful when built in numbers or used to patch gaps in a more automated network rather than as the backbone of a mid- or late-game economy.

• Place drills directly on ore tiles; they only operate when correctly positioned over a valid deposit.
• Expect low output compared with advanced drills; plan for more units or supplemental mining to meet demand.
• Use cheap cost to your advantage: scatter multiple drills across accessible veins to minimize transport distance and keep conveyors short.