Crude Drill

The Crude Drill is an electricity-powered mechanism used mainly to harvest ore boulders. When placed against an ore deposit, it steadily mines the boulder and produces ore over time, making it one of the core tools for large-scale automated mining. It can also serve as a defensive hazard, since it damages creatures in front of it in the same way a trap does.

Crude Drills deal 30 damage per second to ore boulders and walls directly in front of them. This damage ignores all damage reduction, which allows them to break any non-indestructible wall, including Maze Block. They also deal 11–13 damage every other second to creatures standing directly in front of them, so care is needed when placing them near work areas or transport routes.

A Crude Drill can pull items dropped inside it through to the back, which makes its placement useful for compact mining setups and item handling. It also has a special interaction with Ancient Waypoints: it can break them in a single hit, ignoring the usual damage reduction applied to them.

For ore production, a single Crude Drill on an ore boulder produces one ore every 4 minutes and 15 seconds. Adding more drills to the same boulder speeds up production, but with diminishing returns. Even so, the maximum setup of 8 drills remains the most efficient overall, producing one ore every 45 seconds. The usual progression from one to eight drills is as follows:

• 1 drill: 4:15 per ore
• 2 drills: 2:09 per ore
• 3 drills: 1:30 per ore
• 4 drills: 1:15 per ore
• 5 drills: 60 seconds per ore
• 6 drills: 50 seconds per ore
• 7 drills: 47.5 seconds per ore
• 8 drills: 45 seconds per ore

Because efficiency per drill drops as more drills are added, early setups can still be worthwhile, but full eight-drill arrays give the best total output. This makes the Crude Drill especially valuable for long-term automated ore extraction, wall breaking, and certain utility applications where its ignored damage reduction matters.