Guide (Mining)

Mining overview

To construct your station you need metal ingots and gases, which are made from ores and ices, which are to be extracted from the ground with the means of mining.

Basic mining guide

Preparing to the mining trip

• Have your primary equipment:
  • Mining Drill, Mining Drill (Heavy) or Pneumatic Mining Drill charged.
  • Mining Belt or Mining Backpack worn to automatically catch ores and ices. Bring a few extra if you can.
• Have your secondary/optional equipment
  • Ore Detector or Sensor Lenses. Optional. Ores can be spotted visually well enough.
  • Tablet with Tracker cartridge AND a working Tracking Beacon at home. It will help you get home at night, in storm or if you get lost.
  • Light source: Road Flares/Flare Gun or Portable Light. The helmet light is weak and power hungry.
• Make your life support okay:
  • Suit battery, breathing air canister and jetpack canister.
  • Character's Nutrition and Hydration.
  • Food and Water.
• Be ready for accidents
  • Have duct tape on you in case you fall in a hole and damage your suit
  • A Storm will hinder your vision greatly and prevent flying.
    • It will also blow away (steal and destroy) items you left by your base. Tidy up and fasten your crates and tanks before you leave.
    • You can mine during the storm if you already are at vein, but finding a new ore patch may be difficult.
  • Before you leave your base make sure that nothing is going to overheat, overflow, overpressurize or explode for some other reasons.

How to dig

1. Spot a surface node of the vein of desired ore or ice and approach it.
2. If you're unsure what the ore is (e.g. silicone and ice are particular hard to distinguish sometimes) aim at it with your drill in hand. A note will appear on the screen.
3. Look around. Note and remember where your base is.
4. Activate your Mining Drill (right click).
5. Aim at the ore and hold left mouse button. The ground start deforming and the ore node will vibrate and eventually disappear into your mining belt.
6. Keep removing dull ground roughly 1m around the spot until you find an another node revealed.
7. Repeat until you done or the vein is mined out.
8. Fly out the hole you made using jetpack (j) or dig a walkable ramp up.
9. Turn off the drill to save its battery.

Tips

Before leaving a partially mined vein make the topmost ore node intact and exposed so you can find it later and distinguish it from an exhausted vein.

You can relocate your ores from the mining belt into your regular inventory (jetpack, backpack, uniform, cardboard boxes, etc), but ices stored not in the special ore slots will begin to melt and evaporate as soon as outside temperature reaches above zero.

Means of mining

Tier	Tools	Notes	Yield	Automation
0	Pickaxe	Useless. If you have no batteries you're dead anyway.	100%	Manual labor
1	Mining Drill	Basic tool	100%	No. Auto unloading belts at best
1	Mining Drill (Heavy) and Pneumatic Mining Drill	Advanced tool. Digs faster.	100%	No. Auto unloading belts at best
1	Mining Charge and Demolition Charge	Explosives	100%	No.
2	O.G.R.E.	Stationary device	100%	Can be automated, needs to be reconstructed and relocated upon exhausting the reachable area.
2	Autominer Small	Stationary device	200% ores, 150% ices	Can be automated, needs to be reconstructed and relocated upon exhausting the reachable area.
4	Deep Miner	Stationary device	infinite resources	Can be automated to work forever, needs supporting machinery
5	AIMEe	Wandering robot	100%?	Requires programing
6	Rocket Miner	Autonomous shuttle	infinite resources	Needs supporting machinery

Priorities

Iron age

At the start game you will need iron, copper and silicon. Even a stack or two of each will do good. If your difficulty settings disallow eating and drinking with a helmet on, very very soon you'll need at least 4 oxite pieces to fill a 1x1x1 closet with minimally breathable mix (drop in the room and melt it with your Welding Torch).

Steel age

To operate your Furnace for the first time, you'll need 150 iron, 50 coal, 1 oxite and 2 volatiles (or 2 and 4 if you're kinda slow or the weather is cold like on Europa). Of course, you can make less than 200 steel in your first batch, but why would you? From now on you'd better grab all the iron ore you can lay your hand on, not forgetting a corresponding amount of coal. Your demand for copper will gradually rise up from now on.

If you stumble at gold, silver or lead — have a stack or two.

Since the steel lets you build the Station Battery and a few pieces of gold and copper let you hook it up with a Cable Coil (Heavy) to the Solid Fuel Generator, you now can utilize coal for energy generation if you prefer it over Solar Panels.

Golden age

Further advancement will be impossible without the moderately difficult alloy smelting. Your fist batches of solder (lead+iron) and electrum (gold+silver) will widen your construction capabilities. Do not overdo it, a stack of each ore will give you enough alloys to play with. Do not forget that gold and silver are also used in raw non-alloy form, especially the gold.

Also mine copper, you'll need a lot of it. Less so for the silicon, but still.

As your facility grows, you'll need to supply it with gases. Have a stack of volatiles for your smelting operations. It is up to you which breathable air mix to use on your station, but if you aim at the realistic (but not strictly required by the game mechanic) composition of 25% oxygen and 75% nitrogen, then you'll need to mine roughly 4 pieces of oxite and 10 pieces of nitrice per frame of pressurized volume.

For the life support purposes each player character (of human specie) consumes about 1 oxite ice piece worth of oxygen and 4 ice pieces worth of water per game day.

Nickel age

Invar and constantan are the rest of alloys you can make with the basic furnace. They both need nickel ore.

Cobalt age

Not all of the Advanced Furnace's exclusive smelting recipes require cobalt, but beforehand you had no use for it at all.

Note that so far the uranium has no use in the game.

Space age

There are ways both to prospect ore veins under the planet surface and to mine asteroids (off screen) using rockets. This guide does not cover that yet.