Mining Machine

The Mining Machine is a building used to extract ore from resource veins. It can mine Iron Ore, Copper Ore, Stone Ore, Coal, and other vein resources, and it harvests every vein covered by its working area. By default, each covered vein produces 30 items per minute, so the building becomes much more efficient when placed to overlap as many veins as possible.

Its placement range is shown as a blue fan while building, and white circles appear on veins within range. The machine can only be placed if at least one vein is covered. Unlike most buildings, it benefits strongly from free rotation and off-grid placement: holding Shift while placing disables grid snapping, and using rotation while holding Shift allows finer angle adjustment. This is especially useful for maximizing vein coverage, since the same vein can be covered by multiple Mining Machines and their output stacks on the shared vein. The machine’s power consumption does not change with mining speed.

Mining rate is also improved by Veins Utilization. Each level increases mining speed by 10% and reduces vein consumption by 6%, which makes the machine both faster and more productive. The basic relation is simple: more covered veins means more output, and late-game upgrades can shift how many veins are needed to saturate a belt.

• The machine can be crafted in an Assembler or via the player’s Replicator.
• A Conveyor Belt Mk.I carries 6 items per second, so one Mining Machine covering exactly 6 veins produces 180 items per minute; two such machines can fully saturate one Mk.I belt.
• The same vein may be mined by multiple machines, which is a practical way to raise throughput when a single placement is not enough.
• For late-game extraction, advanced mining solutions are preferred, but the Mining Machine remains the basic and flexible early-to-mid game option for vein harvesting.