Mining Drones Redux

Mining Drones Redux

Mining Drones Redux brings autonomous mining depots and their hard-working drone crews to Factorio 2.1.

Original mod by Klonan. This Redux release is a separately maintained Factorio 2.1 version and cannot be enabled together with the original Mining Drones mod.

Demonstration

Watch the demonstration video

How it works

Place a mining depot near a resource field, select the resource you want it to mine, and insert mining drones.

The depot deploys its drones automatically when its stored resources begin to run low. Drones walk to nearby resource entities, mine them, and carry the products back to their depot.

Mining drones and mining depots are unlocked from the beginning of the game, require no electrical power, and can be used as an alternative to conventional mining drills.

Depot features

• Each depot covers an approximately 50×50 mining area in front of the building. Hover over the depot to display its working area.
• The caution-marked floor area in front of the depot is the drone spawn point.
• Blocking the spawn area raises a warning and prevents the depot from deploying drones.
• Each depot normally supports up to 100 mining drones.
• Drones are deployed automatically as the depot’s stored resource supply falls.
• Resources that require a mining fluid, such as uranium ore, are supported.
• Required mining fluid can be supplied through either of the depot’s side fluid connections.
• Compatible modded resource prototypes are detected automatically and receive the necessary mining recipes and drone variants.

Changing the selected mining recipe or removing a depot destroys the drones connected to it—painfully—so recover the drones before reconfiguring or relocating the depot.

Technologies

Two technology lines improve mining drones:

• Mining drone speed increases drone walking speed, mining speed, and carrying capacity.
• Mining drone productivity gives drones a chance to produce additional products while mining.

Performance

Mining drones are mobile, script-controlled units and therefore require more simulation work than ordinary mining drills.

They are suitable for normal factories and large drone operations, but conventional mining drills remain more UPS-efficient for extreme megabases.

Actual performance depends on your hardware, map conditions, resource layout, active mods, and the number of deployed drones.

Factorio 2.1 Redux update

This release updates the original mod for Factorio 2.1, including the current recipe, fluid, inventory, entity, and object-destruction APIs.

It also improves cleanup of destroyed drones, depots, path requests, and mining targets.

Compatibility

Mining Drones Redux is intentionally incompatible with the original Mining_Drones mod because both mods define the same gameplay prototypes.

Remove or disable the original Mining Drones mod before enabling Redux.