Eruption Drill

The Eruption Drill is an advanced ground drill introduced in Build 136 that expands the player's late-game mining options by allowing extraction of thorium and other high-hardness resources. It functions like an impact-style drill with wide coverage and can use hydrogen as a standard power requirement; it also accepts cyanogen as an optional booster to greatly increase its drilling efficiency. The building occupies a single ground tile and integrates into standard conveyor and power setups used for other drills.

Construction and resource costs changed in Build 147: the Eruption Drill's build cost is 150 thorium, 300 silicon, and 250 tungsten, and its build time is 13.4 seconds. The drill’s base mining speeds were adjusted in the same update: non-beryllium full-coverage speed is 5.33 items/sec (about 0.21 items/sec per tile), while beryllium full-coverage speed is 10.66 items/sec (about 0.42 items/sec per tile). When supplied with cyanogen as a booster (consuming 0.75 cyanogen/sec), its effective speed is doubled.

The Eruption Drill targets hard ores that other mid-game drills cannot handle, including thorium and beryllium, making it a key structure for power generation and advanced production lines. It trades higher build cost and hydrogen consumption for faster throughput and optional cyanogen-boosted efficiency. Compared to the Blast Drill, the Eruption Drill offers a higher unboosted full-coverage drill rate (5.33/sec versus the Airblast’s 3.42/sec). With boosters applied, the Eruption Drill’s beryllium rate becomes exceptionally high — nearly double the Blast Drill’s boosted rate — which makes it the superior choice when mining very hard resources at scale.

Practical notes for use and deployment:

• Place Eruption Drills with full tile coverage over ore deposits to take advantage of their per-tile speed scaling; they perform best when surrounded by extractable tiles.
• Provide hydrogen power continuously; without hydrogen the drill cannot operate. Use power networks or local hydrogen generation to avoid downtime.
• Use cyanogen as an optional booster to double mining speed when you need burst throughput for a production spike or to clear deposits faster. Account for the booster’s cyanogen consumption (0.75/sec) in logistic planning.
• Prioritize Eruption Drills for thorium and beryllium nodes where their higher build cost is offset by superior extraction speed.
• When comparing to other late-game drills, choose the Blast Drill if you need slightly better boosted base-speed on very low-hardness tiles, but prefer the Eruption Drill for overall throughput on hard ores and boosted beryllium extraction.