These guys mine for you, based from their mining depot.
Old demonstration video: https://streamable.com/ymk8h
You can mine any ore including modded ones and Uranium, by inputting the required fluid into the depot. The mining area is shown when hovering over a depot, it is a 80x80 area in front of the depot.
Ore mining rate is about 30 per drone per minute, if ore patch is nearby depot. By default, it's up to 100 drones in a depot, so totally 3000 ore pcs per depot per minute. You will have lower rate if ore patch is farther (which will happen naturally due to its exhaustion) and higher rate if you research mining productivity or drones speed technologies.
You need to research a technology to unlock Drones and Depots.
Drones recipe is customasable by startup settings. There are the following optional ingredients:
Some of these will also affect depot's recipe. The cost of science packs and required dependencies of root technology will be updated with startup settings you pick. So, you can make Mining Drones an early-, mid- or late-game technology.
Mining drones produce pollution in accrodance with to vanilla drills. The amount can be adjusted by map settings, whether you prefer more or less pollution.
Drones consume electric energy to perform work, so you need to attach a power pole. Default value of required energy usage by a drone is 100 kW, it can be edited with settings, down to 0. Note that depot also consumes energy as 5 drones to maintain their management.
Configurable number of drones in a depot, default capacity is 100, but you can set 10-2000. Other forks have a bug of ore deletion when there are too many drons, it's solved here.
Also you can change drones' item stack size from 20 to 5-500.
I removed additional Productivity research for mining drones, now vanilla one is used. This can be reverted by settings.
Also you can disable Burner or Electric Mining Drills to live with drones only!
If you accidentally grab ore from a depot, it will be put back when you open it :)
I spent several hours to burn my brain, but made migration process from original Mining Drones mod and its forks as smooth and seamless as possible, recreating state management objects and cleaning all the hidden entities to prevent wandering drones, collision with invisible walls and overlapping text labels.
Supported & compatible mods:
In case you use a mod that performs some complex logic that breaks ore detection by depots (like teleportation or ore growth), you can use manual commands /mining-depots-rescan
or more cruel /mining-depots-total-reset
Skin mods:
The following languages are supported:
Hope you will love my mod 😊 Bug reports are welcome, feature and compatibility requests may be also considered. You can write in mod's Discussions or in Discord.
The mod is based on Mining Drones by Klonan, but I immersed deeply in the code to create the most comprehensive version of original Klonan’s mod providing great balance and many improvements listed above. There was an interesting discussion on Reddit.
Partially it's similar to my previous mod Mining Drones improved Tech which was a separate patch with recipe change only, while this one is a fork due to it allowed much more improvements.
For other modders: my goal is to MD2R maximally extensible and compatible. Check out related FAQ section.