Mechanical Drill

The Mechanical Drill is a basic mining building used to extract primitive ore in early- to mid-game stages. It was introduced prior to version 6.0 (added in version 5.0 or earlier) and is intended as a cheap, indefinitely-operating extractor that must be placed directly on ore tiles. In version 6.0 its short description was adjusted to explicitly state that it must be placed on ore rather than on “appropriate tiles.”

The drill requires no electrical power or other continuous inputs to operate in its default configuration. It only mines basic resources and cannot handle advanced ores or high-throughput extraction by itself. The Mechanical Drill has a booster (optional Reinforced ) slot that can accept a fluid input to increase its speed; supplying the booster with water at 3/s multiplies its output speed by 2.56×.

Performance characteristics (typical values drawn from tile-by-tile measurements):

• Typical base extraction per tile: about 0.08–0.10 items/sec (varies slightly by ore tile).
• Typical boosted extraction per tile (with 3/s water booster): about 0.22–0.26 items/sec.
• Typical maximum rate per drill (unboosted, working multiple tiles or stacked performance): about 0.34–0.40 items/sec.
• Typical maximum rate per drill when boosted: about 0.87–1.02 items/sec. These ranges reflect differences across ore types and the drill’s placement; expect around 0.09–0.1/s unboosted per tile and ~0.23–0.26/s per tile when boosted.

Practical usage and strategy:

• Place Mechanical Drills directly on ore tiles to start continuous extraction; they are the cheapest option for early resource collection.
• They do not need electrical wiring or power to function, which makes them ideal for very early-game bases or remote outposts without a power grid.
• Use the booster slot to dramatically increase throughput. Supplying water at 3/s to the booster yields a 2.56× speed increase and is the simplest way to scale a drill’s output without replacing it.
• Because each drill’s base rate is low, chain multiple Mechanical Drills across an ore vein or upgrade to higher-tier drills as soon as you can support the infrastructure and power requirements.
• Reserve Mechanical Drills for basic ores and starter lines; advanced ores and high-demand production chains benefit from faster extractors.

Design notes:

• The building is purposely simple and inexpensive; its role is to provide reliable, perpetual mining of basic resources rather than high-capacity extraction.
• The booster mechanic allows a cheap conditional scaling option (consume a small fluid flow in exchange for a large speed multiplier) before switching to more expensive drill types.