Deep drill is pretty annoying

[enragedcamel]

With the current design, you have to deconstruct and rebuild the thing multiple times in order to fully extract the resources in a vein. Not only does this impose a hidden tax on the process (since you only get a portion of its resources when you deconstruct it) but it also makes the whole process tedious.

Constructive suggestion: new research item called Automated Deep Drill. Has a much wider radius, enough to cover a whole vein, requires more electricity but can work by itself. To balance it further, you can have the resource extraction efficiency be effected by distance from the center.

[Mkok]

I didnt really get to building deep drills yet, but cant you just build more of them on the whole deposit at once, instead of having only one at a time?

[jamaicancastle]

You can build multiple drills, but that means extra power and extra pawns to work them.

Honestly I think deep drills need a buff in general. It made sense for them to have all of these drawbacks when they were literally the only way to get materials once you'd mined out the surface, but now that you can caravan hop to a new zone, resource exhaustion is pretty much a moot point.

[Listy]

With the current design, you have to deconstruct and rebuild the thing multiple times in order to fully extract the resources in a vein. Not only does this impose a hidden tax on the process (since you only get a portion of its resources when you deconstruct it) but it also makes the whole process tedious.

Constructive suggestion: new research item called Automated Deep Drill. Has a much wider radius, enough to cover a whole vein, requires more electricity but can work by itself. To balance it further, you can have the resource extraction efficiency be effected by distance from the center.

There's a similar problem with Moisture pumps. Only difference is you can't turn moisture pumps on or off, and they take literally forever to pump out the area. Which wrecks the flow of the game.

[Limdood]

miniaturization mod.

Allows deep drills to be picked up and moved....should be in base game IMO

[SURU]

Miniaturization for the win as Limdood said. I like all items movable.

[grrizo]

Deep drill should have the "reinstall" option, that would be more realistic. Just that.

[Wishmaster]

I agree and I use the miniaturisation mod too.
But I think they need an improvement anyway... I personally increased the radius because of how often you have to move them. That's annoying micromanagement.

Perhaps deep drills needs a very important radius but speed would decrease depending of the distance of the lump with the drill.

[TheMeInTeam]

Deep drill should have the "reinstall" option, that would be more realistic. Just that.

This.  I wouldn't even mind a resource cost for reinstallation of certain things like this.  It is annoying having to do extra inputs, though this is a relatively minor issue in the game.

[Hans Lemurson]

Have to pay for the new drill bits and shaft casing or something.  It just happens to cost 25% of the normal build cost of the drill!

Or maybe the drill could use up steel like fuel as it runs?  This could give it a cost proportional to the rebuild cost.

Or maybe the drills should be autonomous robots and move and drill on their own!  Nothing could go wrong with this!

[Shurp]

If anything, deep drills are in need of being nerfed.  Look at the quantity of resources you get out of one compared to what you have to sink to make one.  It's fantastic.  And their power consumption is cheap.  It's a hell of a lot less risk than trudging across the map mining (and keeping your pawns from being eaten by bears) and a lot less work than making trade goods or setting up a new base somewhere else (hope you have a muffalo pack to haul off everything you've built so far).

At least, this has been my experience.  Get deep mining, watch colony wealth explode.  But then I'm playing on a small hills map where resources are hard to come by any other way.

[corestandeven]

I agree with the OP about the drill. I had a few suggestions on how to improve mining, but they drew no comments - https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=32760.msg334610#msg334610

In general I think the end-game mechanics and technologies need work. A lot of effort by the devs seems to have gone into the start and mid-game, but the late game technologies seems half-baked. After all, the end game is very focussed on gathering large amount of resources to build the ship, and things like drilling (which are there to aid the player in that goal) seem of limited value and/or even hinder you (e.g. building a drill on a resource area, where you have no idea what you'll get, then losing resources when you have to deconstruct to try elsewhere).

[Wishmaster]

If anything, deep drills are in need of being nerfed.  Look at the quantity of resources you get out of one compared to what you have to sink to make one.  It's fantastic.  And their power consumption is cheap.  It's a hell of a lot less risk than trudging across the map mining (and keeping your pawns from being eaten by bears) and a lot less work than making trade goods or setting up a new base somewhere else (hope you have a muffalo pack to haul off everything you've built so far).

At least, this has been my experience.  Get deep mining, watch colony wealth explode.  But then I'm playing on a small hills map where resources are hard to come by any other way.

That's true aswell.
AFAIK plastell take the same amount of work to mine as steel. While it requires much more in handmining.

But deepdrill is still annoying to manage.

[XenGrimm]

A lot of people mod in drill alternatives - including myself - so I do feel this needs some attention.

[Bozobub]

If there's that many mods, perhaps it's best left that way?

Not a vote either way, btw, just a suggestion.