Best way to mine?

[Piemaker]

I'm a bit new to all of this and have recently been trying to figure out what the best mining method is?
Is it quarrys, mining turtle etc.
Also if there is any automated mining system, that would be cool. ;P

Edit:Like set up and forget forever mining system.

 

[drazath]

Qurries and mining turtles are an option, yes. They aren't truly 'forget forever' systems, since you'd still need to move them to new mining areas and make sure they have power to operate. I find that they work better on a server that runs 24/7, since you can designate a large area and let them work their own pace (as opposed to single player where you probably won't be running the game all the time).

There's really no beating good ol' manual mining when it comes to speed and efficiency, however. I prefer the mining laser personally because it destroys stone instantly, and it's clearing away the stone that normally takes a lot of your time when mining. The horizontal mode is great for quick mine shafts, then just switch to low-focus mode once you hit the ore veins (tho I'd still recommend a drill/pickaxe for rare stuff like diamonds, since even in low-focus mode there's a small chance that the laser destroys the target completely).


And of course then there's the dense ore ages from Mystcraft, but that's up to you if you want to utilize them (the ore spawns get pretty insane after you stack a few of those symbols into a single age).

 

[Piemaker]

Ok Ok, I see.
Thanks. I'll prob get quarrys and mine also at the same time.
I don't know too much about Mystcraft, but I heard those symbols are really rare.

 

[Zica]

Ok Ok, I see.
Thanks. I'll prob get quarrys and mine also at the same time.
I don't know too much about Mystcraft, but I heard those symbols are really rare.

Personnally, I don't think dense ore symbols are worth the risk. Becuase if you have instability enabled in the config files, you can get some pretty nasty stuff if you have dense ores activated.

 

[drazath]

And most of that nasty stuff can be avoided simply by going underground, which is where you'd want to be anyway - you're there to mine, not for sightseeing. There's the world decay, of course, but even that can be avoided by constantly moving to new chunks or just making new ages. And the second the decay starts to be threatening, you can just teleport back to the safety of your main world.

You can literally mine a stack of diamonds in minutes, so the rewards definitely outweigh the risks. Which is why I don't stack those dense ore symbols for my ages - it just makes everything too easy.

 

[Peppe]

Turtles are about the only thing you could fully automate. I'm sure there are some well written programs to do this, but writing it yourself is probably more work than it is worth. Using someone else's program would probably make it feel like creative mode. I started down this path but the turtles feel to overpowered, so i now only use turtles for menial jobs like carving out a room in a mountain.

Next best thing:
quarry's are easy to understand and pretty easy setup and move around. Expensive to have more than a few going @ about 11 diamond and good amount of gold each.

mining turtle's default excavate program is a little slower than a quarry doing the same job. You can write faster/better programs or download them and then it is about 3x faster than a quarry. Runs on just about any solid fuel, so very easy to setup, but harder to understand/control compared to a quarry. Easy to move and also easy to have many going at once. 3 diamond is the only significant cost.

The above two dig a big hole down to bedrock... not really the most efficient way to mine.

Turtles given a tunneling/branch mining program will be much more productive as they can basically mine only in the ore rich layers. Again the included programs don't really do this well, but you can write or download custom programs.


Buildcraft's miner is a fail. 1 wide hole to bedrock... no real use.

My favorite is the IC2 Miner.
IC2 miner is good. Its cheap to setup and can be repositioned easily. Will work with iron tools and later can be upgraded to diamond drill. Mines only ore in a 9x9 area (use the ov scanner) and the block directly below down to bedrock. The machine can refill the hole when it is done and return your pipes back. Make a grid of these and move them every once in a while and you can get 100% of the ores in an area. No overload of coble/worthless materials and no giant hole in your world.
It is about 15 minutes from sea level to bedrock and ~350k -700k EU. Quarry or turtle take much longer to get to bedrock.

 

[Sara Dr In te House]

Pros Turtle:

Cost 3 diamonds for a pick
Efficient fuel usage with a good program
Ability to download programs from pastebin built in
Programming turtle (if you like programming)

Cons Turtle:

Programming turtle (unless you like programming)
Pastebin download disabled by default (can be a problem in SMP)
No built in chuck loading unless Misc Peripherals mod is installed

Pros Quarry:

Built in chuck loader
Easy setup
Using Buildcraft 3.2.2 quarry is FAST!!! (default size from 64 to bedrock is about 15 min(took over 1,000,000 MJs))

Cons Quarry:
High resource cost (11 diamond 16 gold and 40 iron)

I just started playing with turtles and made an efficient quarry program that uses minimal fuel. It uses a couple of ender chests for refueling and dropping off dug up resources.

 

[drazath]

Using Buildcraft 3.2.2 quarry is FAST!!! (default size from 64 to bedrock is about 15 min(took over 1,000,000 MJs))

I know the MJ cost per operation was increased recently, so it increased the speed as well?

 

[Sara Dr In te House]

I had 2 electric engines pumping items out of an enderchest just to keep up. I set 2 redstone capacitors hooked up and set for 100 MJ output. There was a speed increase past 50MJ but it wasn't huge. I just wanted to see how fast it was and did not care about energy usage.

 

[Scghost]

my vote goes to miners. with quarries and mine turtles you get tons and tons of stones, sand and dirt. you might say, "well i can build some stuff with the stone i get." but trust me, u will have more sand and stone then u can ever use. quarries also are too slow. i'm there to get ores not every fracking thing that the quarry can cover. the only thing that the quarry has going for it is that it is easy to set up and mine. also, you put an ender chest next to it and getting your stuff in the base is auto. but again... you get just toooooo much stone...... and there is nothing worth doing with it other then make it into scrap.

now miners go directly for the ores in the scanner's range. while setting them up and moving them around is kinda a pain in the rear, u get what u want, ores. i use 4 to cover more ground. and by the time one quarry is done, i have plenty of ores to cook and use.

 

[Peppe]

I simple fire and forget system for the IC2 miner:
1 pump
1 miner
2 generators
4 copper cable
2 stacks of charcoal
2 chests
1 diamond drill
1 ov scanner
64 empty cells (rarely used by pump)
64 pipe

Will get to bedrock with about 30-40 coal to spare in the generators. Generators keep up with the miner demand well. Only the solid fuel in the generator and empty cells are consumed in the process. You can use any EU source that outputs about 20-24 EU/t to run at optimal speed. Ideally it should pickup without a wrench since you only need to spend about 15 minutes per spot.

Chest auto fill by the respective machines. Works with iron chests mod, but does not seem to work with vanilla enderchests (ender mod chests work fine).

 

[PieExplosion]

Are IC2 Miners working properly with all the mod ores? I've been completely avoiding the IC2 Miner for a while now due to that and now you have me curious as to whether it's properly grabbing everything or not.

 

[drazath]

you get just toooooo much stone...... and there is nothing worth doing with it other then make it into scrap.

You can just filter that out with a diamond pipe and into a 1x1 pool of lava to dispose of unnecessary materials - dirt, gravel and cobblestone (as well as fences and wood if you happen across mineshafts) for example.

Granted, it's not very fast, nor does it need to be. Like I said, the quarry shines most on an 24/7 server since it'll be working constantly. A max-size quarry will net you loads of uranium, for example.

 

[RavynousHunter]

Regarding MystCraft worlds with Dense Ores on, you can avoid most of the problems of instability with those worlds by using the Cave World symbol. Unless you dig really far up (y-level <100 or so), you've always got a natural roof over your head. Plonk a quarry down there, hook it to a redstone energy cell (output at 5 MJ/t works fairly quickly, for me), put a chest (preferably gold or diamond, for extra capacity) on top to act as a buffer, and pipe your stuff back home with a pair of ender chests.

That's the method I use, and I get a lot of materials fairly quickly. However, I would suggest using something a bit more powerful than a redstone engine when you're piping things from your ender chest at home to your storage area(s). Even with a redstone engine on the quarry buffer, you can hit an overflow occasionally in the ender chest, which gets really messy, really fast, with BC pipes. If you got the resources, combining a Stirling engine with an autarchic gate (if items in inventory, use energy pulser) works at a reasonable speed, at home, and overflow chance is pretty much nil.

But, really, the best way to mine is whatever way best suits you. Some people prefer quarries, others prefer turtles, others prefer to go down into the depths and dig things out themselves. Experiment, find what works best for you, and just use that.

 

[lindyhopfan]

Are IC2 Miners working properly with all the mod ores? I've been completely avoiding the IC2 Miner for a while now due to that and now you have me curious as to whether it's properly grabbing everything or not.

The IC2 Config file lets you add block ids + metadata to the list of what the Miners will pick up. So if the Miners are not picking up, say, thaumcraft infused stone (if you have thaumcraft installed), just look up the id:meta value for the blocks and add them to the list.

 

[PieExplosion]

The IC2 Config file lets you add block ids + metadata to the list of what the Miners will pick up. So if the Miners are not picking up, say, thaumcraft infused stone (if you have thaumcraft installed), just look up the id:meta value for the blocks and add them to the list.

And if modifying the configs is highly unlikely?

For the sake of all those who can't control the configs of the SMP server they play on, I can't accept "just add them to the list" as a viable solution.

So, once again, are IC2 Miners working properly with all the mod ores? I've been completely avoiding the IC2 Miner for a while now due to that and now you have me curious as to whether it's properly grabbing everything or not.

 

[ItharianEngineering]

By default the miner won't get any of the mod ores other than it's own. It will get them if they happen to be in the way or are between the mining head and the ore it is looking for but it will ignore them otherwise. I don't like to use the miner because of the amount of ores it misses, not only does it miss the mod ores it will only get the near by ores so you have to move it over so many blocks and try again if you want all the ores and you won't know if you really are. I prefer to use the quarry or turtles in a dedicated quarry world as I can see the edges that it doesn't mine so I can come in and mine those out, with the miner these are missed completely unless you are moving the miner just enough to get every inch of area.

 

[Juanitierno]

I would have thought the FTB guys would have added all the valuables to the miner's config files already, at least all the valuables they configured the mods to spawn.

Etho has been using them and ive seen him get forestry copper and tin at the minimum (dont remember what else)

 

[MilConDoin]

In 1.4.2 the miner doesn't know all the interesting ores. In 1.4.5 GregTech autofills the miners list with all ores from the OreDictionary that he knows of.

 

[Zica]

In 1.4.2 the miner doesn't know all the interesting ores. In 1.4.5 GregTech autofills the miners list with all ores from the OreDictionary that he knows of.

You can add in all of the ores you want in the config files.