Impact Drill

The Impact Drill is a power- and water-driven extractor that places on ore tiles and produces items in bursts. Its output scales with how many ore tiles it covers, so a larger patch under the drill increases the size of each batch. It was added in Build 136 and later received a balance pass in Build 147, which reduced beryllium drill speed, added ozone as an optional efficiency booster, and lowered water input.

Unlike simpler drills, the Impact Drill requires both power and water to operate, and it can also consume ozone to improve performance. With full coverage, its maximum rates are significantly higher than when it is only partly covering ore. The drill’s batch-based behavior means its production is not perfectly continuous: instead, items are generated in bursts after a delay that depends on the mined resource and whether the drill is boosted.

Typical rates and input values are:

• Base output per tile: 0.17/sec for one resource and 0.09/sec for the other listed resource
• Boosted output per tile: 0.29/sec and 0.14/sec
• Maximum rate at full coverage: 2.66/sec and 1.33/sec
• Boosted maximum rate: 4.66/sec and 2.33/sec
• Water input: 10/sec
• Booster input: 3/sec ozone, for a 1.75x speed increase

The drill’s burst timing also changes with boost status. At full coverage, one resource has a batch interval of 6.02 s, or 3.43 s when boosted, while the other has 12.03 s normally and 6.87 s boosted. Because the item count in each burst equals the number of covered ore tiles, covering more ore can matter as much as improving raw speed.

In mix-tech environments, the Impact Drill uses tungsten mining rates for most ores, except for thorium, which it cannot mine. This is also the drill’s most notable edge case: although its internal tier value is high enough to mine thorium by hardness, it is explicitly blocked from doing so in code. That makes it the only extractor with a clear hard-coded mining restriction despite having sufficient drill strength otherwise.

When using the Impact Drill, the main optimization is simple: maximize ore coverage, keep both power and water supplied, and add ozone if the boost is worth the extra logistics. Because production comes in batches rather than a steady trickle, it pairs best with item transport and storage that can absorb bursts efficiently.