Deep drills worthless?

[Beider]

So I tested deep drilling again properly for the first time and it seems to be completely worthless. First of all you pay a lot to build the scanner (300 steel, 12 component), then you build a drill (25 steel, 2 component as you get rest back on deconstruct) and the drill can at most get 9 things out of the ground. In my case I got silver so I got 675 silver. This hardly seems worth it to me specially since the drill can't be moved

Anyone found a way to make deep drilling worth it or is it just utterly pointless?

[tonakis2108]

I've got the same idea about this feature. As it is now it's just a way to get "more" out of the maps resources since you cannot access deep earth minerals other way. So unless you get a mod for better machinery it will stay as it is but I wouldn't call it worthless, it does give enough for it's value but not too much. Also deep ground resources are dependent on what biome your in. Hope this helped a bit.

[Thraxon]

It is not what i call worthless.
It is a late game thing, when you have mined most of your map .

The scanner is an invessment and you ll get plenty of steel after it.

The silver you had is not really worth (in terms of time) but it come from the poor yield of the silver mining in general

[Shurp]

Deep mining silver is probably worthless.  Deep mining steel is definitely not.  And you get more than 9 chunks out of each drill.  I think it is two chunks per square but it could be more, I haven't watched closely.

[Sian]

your calculation is quite biased

Firstly, you only need to build 1 Scanner for the whole map, hence it is paid over a lot of Drills

Secondly, Silver is probably (together with Chemfuel?) the least worthwhile resource to get from any single drill, and even then you'd usually be able to buy steel for ~2.5s each (dependent of cause of a lot of things including specific trader type and social skill) and Components for ~15s (same caviats) for a total of ~100s, giving you a net profit of 575

[jamaicancastle]

You get two "lumps" of material per tile, which for most products is 75. Therefore, assuming 9 occupied tiles around your drill, you're looking at 1350 of whatever resource.

Chemfuel can be very valuable as a deep mining product. You get 150 per "lump", or 300 per tile, for a market value of $900 per tile. It also seems to be, if not the most common deep mining yield, at least close to it.

Probably the best, though, is if you hit a vein of plasteel, which can be immensely lucrative both in terms of raw value and in fueling plasteel crafting and construction.

[RazorHed]

I edit the files to allow the drills to be movable.

[Blastoderm]

Better use Core Drill mode. Its 2000 steel 25 components and other stuff along with huge power consumption to build but then produce any metal in tiny lumps.
At least it's making games fun

[Bozobub]

That's up[ to you, of course, but I wouldn't find infinite resources much fun, frankly ^^' .  Deep drills already supply an unholy amount of resources, as it is.

[AngleWyrm]

I wouldn't find infinite resources much fun

What do you do when you run out of resources?

[Bozobub]

You trade for them and/or do without.

[BetaSpectre]

Set the options to allow the creation of a new colony works too.

[Bozobub]

Set the options to allow the creation of a new colony works too.

If your CPU has the "oomph" for it, that is.  Deep drills are still much easier to deal with, overall.

[cpoug]

I find that with the world mechanic the deep drill isn't very useful. I just use drop pods to send miners and supplies to distant tiles and mine the minerals there. The resources used on all the pods + fuel + establishing an outpost are easily made back with how much fresh resources can be mined, especially if you're putting some of it aside into making legendary items. Once you've sufficiently depleted an outpost, just deconstruct everything, send it back, and repeat.

This could probably be alleviated if drop pods were made a little more risky. A small chance to break before it reaches its destination, or being shot down over enemy territory or whatever would make leapfrogging across the map much less of a superior strategy to using deep drills.

It doesn't help that additional colonies seem to severely cut down to raid occurrences.

[TheMeInTeam]

Deep drill is amazing, only real problem is tech cost of ground-penetrating scanner (enormous for tribe in particular).  You can get many thousands of steel or a ton of plasteel quickly and relatively safely.

I wouldn't find infinite resources much fun

What do you do when you run out of resources?

In a mature colony with strong enough economy you can generate enough wealth to call in 3x bulk goods traders whenever they're off cooldown, so your resource income floor in the late game is 3x bulk good trader + random orbital ships, plus a small amount from cargo drops.

Sea ice is the essence of such a scenario:



Even there, if you live long enough you can start up hydroponic cotton farming to craft/trade for resources (or farm drugs), or (amusingly) drain shallow water and grow trees to chop into wood sculptures.  The biome has no resources so the stone you're seeing is from trades, same with steel, wood, etc, and this biome gets too cold to call caravans in winter.  In nicer biomes you can call even more resources in constantly.