Mining for gold

[TheMeInTeam]

There are enough stone blocks lying on the ground to encase a non-mountain base with 3 thick walls if you want, with plenty more for making external pill boxes/chokes, even on plains maps.  Blocks are useful but you can get them without dedicating miners to it unless you actually are talking about a mature colony.

Components, steel, plasteel, uranium etc are all useful too, assuming you have enough pawns to cover growing, research, hauling, handling, cleaning, and constructing.  I guess if you're tunneling into a mountain and have mined out enough space you can have that guy go strip mine while setting up an area for the inevitable infestation.

[quilzas]

Typically when I mine for materials, I do aisle mining. I dig a 1-wide tunnel straight in, skip two blocks, make another 1-wide tunnel parallel to the first, and continue.  This ensures if there's a vein, I'll see it without having to mine out big area or worry about things falling down. I haven't done it in a while, so I'm not sure how prone to infestation they are. However, I don't usually build anything there, and I make sure the tunnels don't connect into my base.