Tips for mining ship builds & Inspiration! - Space Engineers (Vanilla)

[@Christ0o]

My tip is about the general design of miners is to make them shorter and wider so you can turn around if you need to, to perhaps get the rest of the ore vein.

[@LunarKolony]

many times I have swung my mining ships arse around in a tunnel and blown it off

[@Christ0o]

@@LunarKolony yep or a few thrusters have just disintegrated

[@MasterMayhem78]

Or instead add a camera to the rear of the vehicle and just drive or fly your way out without needing to turn around

[@Blazin130]

@@MasterMayhem78 I usually have a rear facing camera and a remote control block facing the rear of the vehicle. When I want to get out of the hole I've dug, switch control to the remote & activate the camera from it.
Also allows for character recovery if I ever fall down a hole and don't have hydrogen left...

[@Mrvoid100]

My first atmospheric miner was beautiful but also very long and I got stuck and damaged my thrusters.

[@taqnology]

I never understand quite why, but every time I build a miner in survival it looks drastically different from the last one. A while back I built an absolute unit of a small grid planetary miner. I had the drills mounted on hinges on the bottom so they could swing outward or dig straight down. She looked like a big metal jellyfish, but it was great fun for strip mining.

[@LunarKolony]

spicing it up with different designs always helps, and by the sounds of that it made mining a bit less tedious and more engaging haha

[@SGTSnuggles19]

I personally like the piston bore approach usually using 7+ pistons in a line with a ore detector attached to the "Drill bit". The ship itself has to be massive due to the sheer volume it can dig through and process itself but I absolutely love watching it auto (using timers) extend each piston while the drill eats into the ground :D It has a small grid miner attached to it via connector which detachs and is able to fly into the newly created mine shafts and cut out more minerals even deeper down more accurately.

[@spankymcflych]

My tip, and honestly I dunno why everyone doesn't do this: Combat ships need more acceleration, utility ships (like miners) need more deceleration. For utility ships you only need enough acceleration to not try your patience, but the more deceleration you have the better. You're constantly nosing into things whereas when you're getting up to speed you're generally just traveling to and from base. Going in hot and not stopping in time is far more common and destructive for a miner then taking a couple extra seconds to get up to speed.
Another tip: Setup a projector with a grid of single blocks going in each direction, with alternating colors every 5 blocks or so. Make sure the blocks come out of your ship on something that prevents them from being built (like have a light or a thruster or something where the grid comes out). And viola, you have a handy measuring rule extending out from your ship to help with the lack of depth perception.

[@bladester0128]

So..... give the ship whiskers haha

[@DjigitDaniel]

This is an immeasurably underrated piece of advice. 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

[@ArmednDeadly]

I, for one, love the vertical miners, they are my go-to design for planetary miners, but I always make the mistake of getting stuck in holes by not making it strong enough to lift the ore it mines.

[@strixfiremind]

There are tons of videos that can help you balance your thrust to cargo ratio. Admittedly, this is an area I struggle as well lol.

[@bitharne]

I’ve got a design I’ve been refining over the years on the workshop. Midas iirc
It’s not a vertical miner but it’s designed to not be able to overload its thrust capacity. More trial and error than anything for it 😅

[@halfcirclehranch6877]

I like to add a survival kit to small grid miners. I set them to refine stone for ingots. This lets me get some extra resources as I go, rather than just wasting all the stone. I still have an ejection system. Usually, I'll keep the ejection system deactivated, but the sorter will also have gravel white listed. When I start getting loaded down on stone, time to toss some out. I always need more iron, and I come back with a bit on every mining run.

[@LunarKolony]

Really interesting tip there about refining stone and removing gravel.

[@tristanjaeschke]

There is a special block that’s either a mod or a dlc block called the “stone incinerator” that I’ll utilize in my miner - it produces iron, nickel, and silicon ingots without the gravel and burns through stone quite well, which allows more room for ore more quickly.

[@halfcirclehranch6877]

​@tristanjaeschke that's a mod

[@GingaNinja829]

You could use a refiner instead of a survival kit so you don't have to manually set it to produce ingots

[@halfcirclehranch6877]

@@GingaNinja829 Only with a mod. I'm not talking about using a mod. Mods are horribly overused.

[@ugib8377]

That Amethyst cockpit is awesome. Love the mech style glass that swings open. Big fan of small grids that don't use the traditional cockpit blocks. Nice vid. Should help plenty of newbros.

[@LunarKolony]

The Amethyst was pretty well received tbf, honestly wasn't even sure about it before publishing lmao

[@ugib8377]

@@LunarKolony for sure one of the prettiest miners I've seen. That cockpit seals the deal though. I'm totally applying that feature to some future builds of mine.

[@roundnround952]

Being a player that likes ship cargo size settings set on realistic, I want to add that a small grid large sorter combined with a small grid connector works best for unloading stone faster. The larger versions contain more volume to get stone in them and out of them. I almost always set this up in the rear of the ship, this allows for the bottom of the ship for the landing connector. The normal cockpit is perfect for this having a large conveyor port underneath it.
Oh, and I always use the PAM script so 4 drills, one in each corner, is a must for me.

[@BrianRonald]

DO NOT put the sorter onto "Drain All". Let the small connectors on "Collect All" do the work; when the sorter is being a dumb filter it can work as fast as all the small connectors can eject. When it's "helping" is slows down to about the speed of one small connector. This lets you put as many small connectors as you like to work, ejecting via a single sorter.

[@KemPeck1701]

that way drains more stone per tick.. so yes.. totally agree

[@EssentialLiberty]

I did not know. Thanks

[@codymartinson9518]

I usually put a single block of conveyor space between the cockpit and the O2 gen to act as an "avionics bay" to fit gyros, remote control, antenna, emergency battery, etc. Plus it's a nice place to attach drill conveyors.

[@baalrog]

For stone ejection you only need one sorter, if all the ejectors are set to pull. You can switch the sorter to whitelist if you want to eject your ore for some reason

[@KemPeck1701]

you actually dump more stone per tick if you use the ejector/connector as the drain.. and have the sorter set as a filter only

[@novantha1]

Huh, I guess I'm pretty unique in my strategy for mining vessels:
I tend to make crazy long vessels with tons of storage and lots of survival kits / refineries on board with the intent of processing stone as I go, and mining straight through the asteroid under the logic that I find it easier to navigate asteroid fields when you can actually get rid of unimportant asteroids so you know which ones you have yet to explore without thousands of waypoints. Additionally: bringing back a variety of ores (or rather, processed materials) in a single trip tends to save you time in the long run because you don't need to always do a dedicated run for each individual resource.

[@Terminator484]

Pro tip: it is not necessary to check "Drain All" on the sorter block, if your connector is set up as shown here. The connector's "Collect All" setting performs the exact same draining function, allowing it to pull valid items through the sorter's filter rules. Let the sorter just act as a passive filter: there are few situations where the sorter's Drain All function is really useful, and it's totally redundant for this task.
You don't need one ejector per sorter, either: you can have many ejectors set to drain, and a sorter passively filtering, and the ejectors will rapidly dump a shower of stuff. In the cockpit hotbar, simply have a control to turn the waste sorter on/off to enable or disable dumping. Leave the ejectors on and set to dump at all times, so they can empty their inventories when you turn off dumping, or else you can end up wastefully carrying around the extra mass in the full inventory space of all your sorters and ejectors.
Also, be sure to have a way to turn off your waste dump when docking with your station or mothership, or else it'll drain from any accessible cargo system. Event controllers & timers work perfectly for automatically turning various blocks off when docked, and back on when you undock.

[@solidmoon8266]

My suggestion for long range miners is have a way to passively regenerate power. Even a solar panel or 2 with an ion atmospheric thruster ship can slowly recharge the ship.
I personally prefer Ion and atmospheric because of the fact there are more options to recharge them (as well as some being passive such as solar and wind on planets), as well as somewhat simpler to build imo.
Plus you don't need to worry about the extra hassle of setting up/protecting Hydrogen tanks and piping.

[@briankale5977]

I made a giant cube atmospheric miner as my first printed blueprint ship of my own design, 3 rows of 6 drills. I learned quickly to add a lot of reverse thrust haha. 1) to slow down from 100m/s (or higher with mods) when weighed down with 3 large cargo containers of ore, and 2) yeah the thrust vector shifts to requiring Up/Backwards for any useful mining.

[@GingaNinja829]

Bro I'm new to SE and your amethyst miner cockpit is insane

[@arcanith7154]

My tip is that you do not nees a massive wall of drills when building lots of them, theres always some space you can leave inbetween and their radius will still drill fine
Not the pretiest or flattest of holes when you do drill, but saves materials

[@lloydharrelson4805]

good info for the new guys also do remember to put some blocks around body of miner so not to hit ground and thing to hope from breaking ship

[@robinandersson99]

Good vid, I like that instead of just telling us, you shit some examples out real quick!

[@jeffreybomba]

For atmo miners I can understand by people build horizontal. The greatest thrust need is vertical and as soon as you lean forward to mine you suddenly need extra toward thrust. A very miner with 10 downward thrusters can support 4 full drills and a med cargo container. Two forward, left and right thruster is enough with a little care when full, and three to the rear gives you enough acceleration and you can fit a fourth if needed. You can use small batteries to make everything tightly compact so the miner is no taller than the drills. Instead of tilting forward and spinning around, you just go straight down and minimize the drill time too.

[@ppdan]

I only build small grid miners. With large grid miners you are nearly forced to build a wall drills to tunnel through something.
Typically go for 6 front drills (4 in each corner of the cockpit and one on each side) which makes your ship wide enough to be able to turn while tunneling.

[@zamba136]

Im a huge enjoyer of a bit of DIY energy in my designs. I have mining vehicles with enough materials to build a small drilling station.

[@LunarKolony]

awesome!

[@PickleNL]

good video good tips. I just came from your previous video which I didn't see before because I was away for a few days.

[@ToddTalksTech]

The WHI Heavy Miner is a great framework to convert atmo to space with room for reactors, jumps, FSD, shields.

[@aurenian8247]

I used to use vertical miners, but they are much more vulnerable to mishaps at the base. These days one of my rules for all ships is:
"If everything loses power and all the connectors disconnect, stored ships will not move"
This means that all ships I build (with few exceptions) can be landed flat on the ground safely without needing to lock landing gear. Even if you don't press P, even if you are a good pilot, sometimes things take a bump. If the thing being bumped is relying on a couple of blocks to not have a very bad fall then you are sitting on a time bomb. Especially important in Multiplayer where you have people of different experience levels flying things around the base.
These days I generally move to large grid miners as soon as possible. The amount of minerals you can bring in is a huge upgrade. So I tend to keep my small grid miners quite simple. Just enough to help bring in what I need to build a compact large grid. Start with a large grid that can bring in 4 or so small cargos full of ore. Then move up to one that can bring home one large cargo. Then onwards and upwards from there. I haven't needed more than maybe 4 large cargos of ore in one trip so far. But I build pretty compact stuff.

[@rebaav]

It's been a bit so I don't know if still true but ore is detected and displayed at the distance from the ore detector block itself *not* the distance from the grid to which the ore detector is attached; this means it's better to have to detector as close to your drills as possible to have the best point of reference for where you need to point your drills. You can test this by having a detector near the front on some of the designs in this vid vs o the back of the miners and you will find orienting yourself to the ore nodes is a vastly different experience.
Wrapping a small grid ship around a large grid ore detector as a prospecting scout would dramatically speed up searching for ores.
Atmospheric miner tricks using Event controller blocks to, say, orient to planetary gravity for vertical miners? Is a system of multiple autonomous cargo containers that can detach from a miner and move ore back to refining base while miner continues with smaller on board storage actually feasible?
Is it feasible to have one or more survival kit block on a small grid miner to process stone and eject gravel?

[@LunarKolony]

very interesting tip about the ore detector

[@themidnightbanshee5927]

My tip is well 2 actually
1 make it big, the more ore you get at once the less trips you need to make
2 atmospheric minning, if your ship needs 6 large thruster to carry the full load add 2 more, this helps when you need to avoid the ground or a mountain in an emergency

[@matt5726]

2024 new player here! I didn't know about the sorting block trick so that very much! :)

[@dunhilyn]

Great video. I am not really creative when it comes to these games but I like playing them so sources of inspiration like this really help.

[@miniblasan5717]

In terms of design, I prefer the first four mining spacecraft you showed (Pertam and the three that were yours) but if you are looking for Uranium then the two large mining spacecraft are better because you usually have to go through large distances to even find Uranium among all the millions of asteroids.

[@LunarKolony]

Yeah uranium can be a serious pain to find

[@phlosen7854]

That cockpit hatch is awesome. I'll certainly take inspiration from that.
Could you use an event controller to figure out if the control populated and close the hatch? I'll try this out later...

[@red-merlin]

Damn! First 2 minutes and the "ejector" tip is major for me. Thanks for that. And yes I'm playing on ps4 so it is on that

[@amatoyoichi8468]

for people that would start on space pod. you can just grind down a few part on your ship to make LG drill than starting mining stone early. unless you play with scrap mod then you cant really do that.

[@LunarKolony]

yeah thats a pretty easy way to get the ball rolling quickly in survival!

[@KemPeck1701]

zero hand mining start.. nothing like it 👍

[@Anuwabu]

Your ships remind me of the KSWH style. Main color+white stripes scheme over that type of block shape that looks like a bracket.

[@siphaanu]

I don't configure my sorters with "Drain All" enabled, only whitelist stone. If "Drain All" is enabled, the sorter moves an amount of stone it can contain every tick which is not much if you have more than one Small Connector attached. If "Drain All" is disabled, the "Collect All" property of connectors pulls Stone through the sorter (as if it was a conveyor).

[@MiniBuster2]

I use the Stone Crusher-mod that I found in the workshop. It makes small amount of useful materials of the stone.

[@chrisbacon3071]

Settle down class teacher Luna is on his way!

[@LunarKolony]

TOP TEEPS

[@chrisbacon3071]

@@LunarKolony TEEPS TOP?

[@linkenparis9562]

ty for the tip about the reverse engine to get out of holes when mining on planets, if I only I watched the video before getting stuck 😁😁

[@LunarKolony]

we have all done it dont worry haha

[@kookoobrick54]

A repair projector is a must. Accidents happen, after all.

[@coreyaustin9646]

Subbed based solely on the number of times I heard "fart/shit it out"

[@LunarKolony]

Legend

[@dmitritelvanni4068]

Still determined to make a terran scv inspired miner that isnt a mech. The og scv used thrusters... I want to implement that so bad. Gonna have to make two models tho. One pure atmo and one pure iron.. trying any hybrid here would be impossible to make look good.... Maybe piston drill feet? Or hinges? Would that be too unstable?

[@frumpkin9282]

Why build a miner when you can just 'borrow' Spartwo's.... :D And then frantically try to glue the missing bits back on before he realises you crashed it. D:

[@Draw2quit]

You should call the vertical miner the Qbert

[@mopadrider6012]

For planet mining u also can just orient youre drils in a other direction

[@0desumilde11]

I would love to see a tutorial on tunnel bores, and if possible how to improve their looks XD
Everytime I try to make one I just end up with a disfunctional sus-looking object

[@LunarKolony]

Hahaha I can have a go!

[@Shaun_Jones]

Practically every ship made to punch holes in things is going to look phallic; form follows function, after all.

[@fhdang8978]

Man I really wish I was as good as you at building I am calculating the weight of my ships for atmo miners because I am crap at planning/ making my ships look good

[@Foxkoun]

I start out on the earthlike and consistantly find myself struggling to hit an ideal sweet spot with design, be it base or any ship type..

[@friedec3622]

I'm struggling to make teabag miner looks good.

[@Konfektionery]

I've built a few vehicles but the only thing that baffling me is designing them with a full load/cargo/laden in strong gravity wells. It's difficult to get a grasp on the theoretical weight distribution of a build when filled up which could mean extra thrusters/power is needed when it's not immediately obvious anywhere in the menus. Many times I'll have a perfectly functional miner but then the drills get loaded and the whole thing just tips all over the place or barely remains aloft in the air and becomes useless for what it's supposed to be doing shortly after a clang incident.
Any tips for finding max weight to power ratio? How can I tell how heavy a full drill/cargo container will become?

[@LunarKolony]

It depends on many things,gravity on the planet, what your inventory multiplier settings are on etc. I recommend checking out existing mining ships on the workshop and getting a feel for how others balance thrust. Generally though, on earth, one large upwards atmospheric thruster can carry a full medium cargo container and two full drills by itself (default settings)

[@ryanburns3921]

Not sure if you still need this. But the Garage Gamer put out an excellent video breaking down all of the thrust/weight ratios, different engine types, etc. As well as the formulas for calculating it yourself.

[@strixfiremind]

For long range miners, don't forget to have at least a gat turret for point defense; pirates are relentless lol

[@deckrect]

My tip is making it hydrogen for all environments and put powerful thrusting backwards for mining down.

[@korvatusklok4059]

What's your opinion on using advance rotors or hinges to convert a boring miner into a plunge miner?

[@KerboOnYT]

Nice tips

[@LunarKolony]

Cheers!

[@sargkookie3118]

Great tute my dude.
Took a shot everytime you said shite.. have no idea what's going on now.. 😅

[@Victoria-bh2ht]

My wheeled mining rover is the superior mining vessel :3

[@AnonNopleb]

Good video. I'm curious, what is your opinion on using a larger connector instead of the former ejectors for an ejection system?
As far as I know it spews out roughly 4x as much stone as the small one (about 1k at a time), but is significantly bigger and the stone chunks are bigger as well.
Do the LG miners have ejector systems with LG connectors as well?

[@LunarKolony]

Not against it, but the connector then isnt as useful for intaking items

[@mikebrunk6884]

On a planet or moon i usually just mine with a rover with a drill on a couple pistons yes takes a-little longer but I always end up crashing a mining ship

[@floof3167]

For that white ship near the end, why are the drills placed so far apart? As far as Im aware, three blocks is about the max

[@tactical_slime4608]

All my ships just look like the main components just glued together with no armor blocks

[@wittyjoker4631]

First tip small grid miner are a complete waste of time. Never eject stone. A full speed refinery will process stone faster than a couple drills can mine it. Stone refines into iron, nickel, and silicone, not to mention the gravel which is what you should be ejecting.

[@aswadianknight4766]

In my experience small grid miners arent worth it if you dont want to mine all the time. Just mine per Hand or build a large grid Digging arm on the ore and you have the recources to build a big one. I shiver to this day thinking how much time we wasted using smal grid miners.

[@HungLikeScrat]

It's on PS4 and PS5, but the PS5 version suffers from a memory issue and has become unplayable for many.

[@LunarKolony]

Oh didn't know about that

[@HungLikeScrat]

Yeah, it's pretty bad. A lot of people are already wanting refunds. They don't care that this is a beta release and there will be issues. This one is on Sony, though.

[@idkatthispoint265]

I make ships that can devour entire asteroids
This kind of design basically deals with all mining problems and it just cant be used in med or high gravity

[@thelordmantis]

I currently trying to design an atmospheric miner ship, but it keeps running out of power and I don't have enough to to get out the hole I dug myself in, Do you have any tips?

[@albertojimenez4528]

Am really confused. I fixed a mining ship but collided w my solar panel. So the 3 ion thruster on left side r gone n i cant built it again y ?

[@albertojimenez4528]

Im tryn fix the ion thruster on miner

[@erebor4nierdzewny970]

I would like to ask you if the buildings have any limit? I mean size. Currently I play privie and learn the game, I have a great idea but not enough knowledge and skills in this game to start building. I'll just say that it's about a flying planet. Is such a thing possible?

[@LunarKolony]

no, theres a point of which blocks no longer render in terms of size, can't remember exactly but its a couple hundred blocks in length

[@hetman36]

Do you know if the pc workshop is linked to the ps5 work shop

[@LunarKolony]

As far as I know they aren't linked, console uses mod.io but I might be wrong

[@sethgilcrist8088]

But some of the main builders have already uploaded there pc builds.
They are a little off but still work.

[@indy1139]

:D

[@LunarKolony]

:DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

[@cynt583]

Also they need yellow, because yellow.

[@LunarKolony]

Yes, yellow is the way

[@the4thj]

Configuring your drill for a noob?

[@BlankFX]

I prefer "boring ships" that make me get resources in 5 minutes instead of weeaboo ships that take me an hour longer just because I have to wait for it's cockpit to open up.
Also, these ships won't be of any use if you're going to mine in moons.

[@eddielopez515]

Tried his build and my ship couldn’t fly for long at all these ideas are good in creative but suck in the real play through.

[@levianderson5253]

Is there anywhere I can download that base?

[@LunarKolony]

it comes with the heavy industry update, might be part of the DLC? check you world scenarios

[@LunarKolony]

ua-cam.com/video/WmfoU_ec7Rw/v-deo.html

[@levianderson5253]

@@LunarKolony Thank you man. been trying to replicate the docking area just by this vid lol

[@GhostOfSnuffles]

You could say they're..... miner tips.

[@orlyyarly4115]

Love your videos, one criticism...don't jerk your mouse around as much when talking and showing things. Lots of people get nauseous with 1st person extremely jerky movements like that and have to stop watching.

[@laureven]

I just sh*t this comment out :) ...why ?? ...are You trying to be cool ?? … Cool video regardless :)

[@revan2837]

Great video, although it became hard to watch, with the quick mouse movements of your screen. 🤢

[@LunarKolony]

Not heard that one before lmao

[@BrianRonald]

@@LunarKolony Yeah, the bit where you were looking at the large grid miners was a little crazy. As you glanced between the two it was hard to get a good look at either.

[@LunarKolony]

@@BrianRonald fair enough haha

[@regularvoltaire2837]

Throughout all the videos of yours I've tried to watch, I can't because you have your mouse and keyboard clicking in the background ENDLESSLY. Audio balancing isn't that difficult and it makes your end product way worse when you don't pay attention to it.

[@rafairacki9302]

Don't even bother building a small grind miner ship, the amount of storage is way too low.

[@redjumping]

Your vids are really super useful!
But your continual rapid mouse movement is hard to watch, I have to keep my eyes closed most of the video :)

[@LunarKolony]

I will try to slow it down lol, didn't realise how quick I went 😂