Pneumatic Drill

Pneumatic Drill is a tier-2 floor drill used to extract ores of hardness 0–3. It sits between basic drills and higher-tier extractors in cost and throughput and is commonly used as an efficient single-tile miner for early to mid-game setups or as supplemental feed in larger production blueprints. The Reinforced Pneumatic Drill variant increases single-tile efficiency, making it especially useful when a limited number of ore tiles must supply a blueprint or when you need to boost throughput on isolated deposits.

The drill’s build time was slightly reduced in a past update (from 0.32s to 0.31s). Like other drills, Pneumatic Drill output scales with drilling speed modifiers (boosters and conveyor throughput) and with the resource’s intrinsic hardness. A dedicated speed booster tuned for drills multiplies its mining speed; with a booster set at 3.5/sec the effective speed multiplier is 2.56×.

Practical throughput figures (per tile) are:

• Typical per-tile mining: 0.11–0.15 items/sec depending on the resource.
• Boosted per-tile mining: 0.28–0.38 items/sec.
• Maximum per-tile rate (with ideal conditions / stacking): 0.43–0.60 items/sec.
• Maximum boosted per-tile rate: 1.10–1.54 items/sec. Exact values vary by resource; the table used by the game lists specific rates per resource (examples above reflect the range across common ores).

Usage and strategy notes:

• Place Pneumatic Drills centered on the resource tile and feed output directly into conveyors or routers. Their small footprint favors dense packing when mining multiple adjacent tiles.
• Use the Reinforced Pneumatic Drill on single isolated rich tiles or where a small cluster must supply an entire sub-blueprint; the Reinforced version provides noticeably better per-tile efficiency.
• Boosters significantly increase throughput; prioritize placing speed boosters that affect the drill or increasing drill count rather than overclocking downstream belts that become chokepoints.
• For larger ore fields, combine multiple Pneumatic Drills into belt arrays or connect them to mass unloaders to avoid belt saturation; for high-throughput needs, step up to higher-tier drills when available.
• Slightly faster build time marginally improves early automated placement or blueprint construction speed, but the difference is minimal in normal play.

Pneumatic Drill is a reliable mid-tier option that balances cost, footprint, and throughput; use its Reinforced form when single-tile efficiency matters and pair drills with appropriate boosters and belt capacity to realize their full output.