Drilling

I totally agree

ive always liked the idea of having a ship that i can core through a planet/asteroid with.

i have not felt this problem yet in se2, but i can see it happening very easily with a lot of the planetary terrain clipping ive experienced.

would LOVE to see the "clearing mode" of drills increase in speed capability or different types of drills specifically for that type of craft. a "Virgil" sort of drill mode.

Guys, plz, pay attention on this topic. I have no interest to play the game because I can't build my favourite type of drilling ships. It's such an easy move to enlarge the radius of drills, isn't it?

Agreed - drill radius isn't quite right, I think it needs increasing by about 10%-20%. It's not only causing ships to get stuck, the small radius is making mining incredibly tedious.

Up! Keens, come on, guys! Its is so easy to fix that issue, and I'll have an interest to play SE2. Not only me, As I see 52 voices is more the enough, according to the average volume of voice for the topic you pay attention at.

I wonna play the game, but without optimized drilling process it's too boring.

Come on, do it for us. Please!

UPP!!!I also ran into this problem while building a drill wall

I've run into small problems making drills where the thing I'm drilling through leves like a one or two voxel chunk that some how enters the collision box of the drill, so I can't destroy it, and it get's the drill stuck.

I think the "fix" that is needed for this is that is unconnected to anything inside gravity, should "collapse" if hit with anything rather than somehow block the far higher mass of the drill. It clearly can do this if a ore chunk is dropped when the inventory is full.

I'm fond of having more than one type of drill (not counting large/small/hand-held) more than just changing the way an existing drill works. I do want to build my spacecraft so that they can 'mostly' core/worm-drill forwards. One of the problems with these builds is that if you make the ship too long/large you can't turn or pivot and must back the ship up.

One solution will be to have rotors+hinges+pistons allowing you to have a dynamic quality to your drilling ship and while that feels like over-engineering, that's kinda what the game is about. But the problem of stray voxels remains unless you go with an excessive, slow, and over-complicated design.

My suggestion is that when 2+ drills are in close proximity, they 'drill' the space between them. So if a regular drill has an effect radius of 4m, when two drills are mounted 10m apart from eachother (when measured by the center of their drilling effect area) they get a bump of 1m each to 'connect' the drilling effect area between them.

how many votes are enough? Oh, come on, we are fighting against so many bugs. Give us a meditation to drill out the stuff without that handdick... drill, handdrill, i mean)

For SE2, we had better have more alternative ways to effectively mine for resources. I'd like to see automation play a bigger role. Build real permanent mining rig with fewer but more clever drill heads. More rover-based mining. Or better yet, give us tracks finally. Let us build proper mining equipment that makes sense and is not plain inferior to the "more convenient" flying miner. At least on planets ffs. I can understand worm-like miners in SE1 as there were no planets to begin with. Here we have a planet as first-class citizens. Gameplay has to reflect this. In zero-g worm miner makes sense. But in gravity we need more viable options. And, ofc we need a reason to mine on planets. We need our "need to create" driven by the game design, not only "because I want to" while accepting worse performance and PCU waste for nothing.

I agree, but I have a basic mining ship with 6 drills, and some solar panels that reach outside the drill radius a little, and have had no trouble boring straight through an asteroid. Maybe this has been adjusted?

UP! ^^

I just posted about this issue then found this post, glad i'm not the only one wanting this change and hopefully gets addressed soon.

I'd like to see this adresses as well, but my work around this problem was to mount the drills on a rotor.. Or tilt the ship from time to times to cover a more uniform area.

But I prefer my rotor drilling tool head.

One of my main frustrations in making a driller. You can't place drills next to each other, collision issues. Logically, if you place 2.5 drills then 2.5 conveyors (mirrored or centerline), you get voxel artifacts (pixels or spears).

Was frustrating to not understand why my ship was stuck, troubleshooting the actual build, gyro placement, power, orientation, clearance, etc...only to search online and find out about pixels.

That's rough for us new players, where everything you do is right, but still glitched unusable.

Physics jank is fine, like KSP, it's fun. Voxel jank, not as much. Drilling into stalagmites creates death bases.

(Edit - intentionally create pixel mines for your base as defense, though. I created a cave base, and had so many death pixels, everywhere. Players want a cool base, this creates boobytraps in it, hurts the player gameplay experience.)

UP!^^

Good to know it is not just my drillship.. Annoying.

At 81 votes, how does this not even have enough votes to be under consideration? Honestly the most frustrating part of using the ship-drills right now. It's usually easier to just go back to the hand drill just to be able to make sure you're not leaving any voxels behind.

I thought it was me. Yes increase the drilling radius please. Fix this.

I agree! If you have a wide birth of the drills it should act in a realistic way and make the hole wider for the ship to fit. This was always an issue in SE1 for me :/

UP^^^

I've started playing games trying to get full coverage of my drills, such as severely staggering the drills and mixing small and large drills to ensure all areas are covered. I don't think the drilling radius needs much of an increase--just enough so that two drill attached as close as possible to each other have no gaps in what gets drilled.

yeah, either balanced as drills being able to be placed right next to each other, removing clipping issues, or balanced as staggered spacing, with the same sized blocks in-between, and increase drilling radius. If they keep the current metrics, which require conveyor slices...which causes further conveyor piping issues when connecting everything up... the problems grow larger the bigger the drill rig is. Mechanical blocks offset the problem for rotating drill heads, but the ole standard worm drive drill ship is problematic to operate. Annoying as this is the natural progression of building drilling ships for a new player...is to add another drill head. Then these weird pixels problems are made known to the player, to the game's frustrations. This is an old issue, there has to be a plan or something they are considering for it.

In my opinion, the whole problem with drills and drilling rigs stems from three reasons: the inappropriate shape of the drilling device, the improperly chosen area of operation for the drilling device (the area where the drill destroys voxel material and the area where it damages game structures), and the inappropriate behavior logic of the voxel material.

1) The designers were apparently inspired by tunnel boring machines. However, a tunnel boring machine has a circular-cross-section drill bit, and the machine itself also has a circular cross-section. There’s no problem there... In the game, it’s different—the drill bit is circular, but the rest of the mechanism has a square cross-section. So either the drill bit extends beyond the edges of the mechanism, or it doesn’t cover the entire front surface of the mechanism, leaving a column of voxel material behind.

2) The area in which the drills damage and “process” voxel material and the area in which the drills damage structures are similar or even identical. This means that drills placed right next to each other so that their voxel material mining areas overlap end up damaging each other.

3) Voxel material has very high or “infinite” strength. This allows long and very strong columns to form between several drilling tools. Real-world material—rock—does not behave this way; the resulting column of rock breaks off very easily (and is thus rendered harmless). A second problem with voxel-based material is that even small remnants—small volumes of voxel-based material—have high strength and behave like a very solid obstacle, anchored in space as a static object.

What can be done about this?

The standard design of the drilling mechanism in the SE1 used drill bits with a collision diameter smaller than the dimension of the drilling mechanism’s cubic base.

Conversely, the workspace roughly corresponded to the circumscribed circle—meaning it extended into the adjacent block to a depth of approximately 0.21 times the block’s size, but did not interfere with the scaled-down collision model of the drill bit in the adjacent blocks. The long “shank” ensured that the working space would not collide with the cubic base.

I do not expect the designers to return to the tried-and-true design...

Another possible solution is to shift and enlarge the working space or change its shape. If the drill’s “spherical” working space were shifted forward by approximately “half a block,” that would be enough to prevent a collision with the collision model of the adjacent block, while also allowing the work spaces of diagonally adjacent blocks to overlap so that no columns of voxel material form between them.

Probably the best solution would be to change the shape of the drill’s “working space.” The “ideal” shape could be a truncated cone; the smaller base would have a diameter equal to the inscribed circle of the block’s wall, while the larger, more distant base would have a diameter 1.5–3 times the size of the block ((at least 1.5 times the block’s dimension; 1.41 is the diameter of the circumscribed circle). The height of the truncated cone would be chosen so that it does not interfere with the collision models of adjacent blocks. A height of “one block” should be sufficient with some margin.

Changing the properties of voxel material—such as column formation and residue left behind—is a topic for a longer discussion. For example, https://support.keenswh.com/spaceengineers2/pc/topic/54553-floating-voxels-in-gravity-should-turn-to-pick-up-deposits

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This image displays the current only working method of placing drills that I've found that does NOT leave any debris or voxels behind while trying to mine. If you place them in a square, you have no hope of getting drills to give a nice clean cut for tunnelling, leaving behind voxels your ship keeps getting stuck on. But if you offset rows, you can keep them all with a 1.5m spacing in between, something the large drills won't let you do if you put them in a square.

If you try to do this same offset positioning with small drills, the distance required is 1.5m one way and 1.0m the other. This shows there's an incredibly SMALL difference between the small drills and the large drills digging areas, despite a SIGNIFICANT size difference, going from 3x3 to 5x5 (on a 0.5m grid).

Despite the fact that there IS a current working method for getting drills to do what everybody wants them to do, this also proves a very clear issue: The current spacing required leaves absolutely NO room for creative shaping of miner ships, despite the fact that we have a 0.25m grid available to us. We can't put them further apart because the digging area is too small, and we can't put them closer because the drill head is too big.

The small drills are very difficult already because there are barely any blocks small enough we can put in between the drills, but at least they can be moved around a bit to give somewhat of a custom look because their head is quite a bit smaller. The large drills however, forget it. They really need a larger drilling range so we can give them more spacing, make actual creative shapes using the 0.25m grid, and actually decently put enough other blocks such as thrusters in between them.

Perhaps our problems stem from the fact that our thinking is too restricted. . . We think only in squares and right angles. . . and in uniform rectangular patterns.

All in all they just have to enlarge the drilling radius. And if they wonna let us build more interesting and complicated drilling worm-ships , they have to enlarge it even a little bit more. IDK why they cannot do it, its just a change of one parameter in the drill-block settings. They are too bussy perhaps.

Also there is a tradition of many years in the SE1, where we had a radius quite letting us place a drill after 1 large block to the next drill and worm all ores out.

Someone with the time and interest could conduct some research: Verify the shape and dimensions of the collision model for drilling machines of various sizes, as well as the shape and size of their “working space” (both front and side profiles). After such verification and determination of the actual conditions, one could consider proposals for the most suitable layout solutions for drilling machines of various sizes.

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While the 3x3 - mid cockpit- 4 small drills in the corners 'worm' ship works nice in Excavation mode, in ore Mining mode leaves a voxel spike (still useful but needs a bit mouse play).

The 3x3 BIG drill build is dysfunctional because the scaling of the bore hole not matching the proportions of the increased grid size.

seems to me that it could be a really simple fix. simply place an imaginary voxel hand 1/2 metre behind all drill heads that erases voxels, The game can already do what we need it to do, its just not been added to the drills.

This feedback is not correct. I have made designs that fit down their own hole without rogue voxels when using right button terrain clearing mode.

Mining normally with two drills side by side I often collide with stray voxels that have been missed, would be nice for that not to be an issue, don't recall ever having that issue in SE1. The terrain clear seems to function correctly though.

The question should be:

"Do we need to mine with a mining ship and fit into the hole we make?"

Is this approach to mining still valid in the new game?

We used to do things this way in SE1, but a lot of it was simply because of the game's limitations. There were not even planets or mining in gravity in the beginning. Mining with a worm-like ship was a traditional low-effort approach in zero-G. This approach then migrated to mining in gravity once planets were added.

But to be fair, mining with a flying ship on a planet was never really a good approach. It was just more convenient compared to other methods like rovers or mechanical mining arms. Other solutions required more setup, time and PCU, so mining ships were still king. But this was mostly because of the poor implementation of ground vehicles, no track-based vehicles, poor controls for complex mechanical arms and so on.

At the same time, the gameplay perfectly allowed flying helicopters to mine in gravity and carry substantial loads. All of this can, and imo should, be changed in the new game.

Worm-like miners can always be a thing in space, where there is zero-G. But in gravity there should be other methods of mining that are more interesting, more engaging and require actual engineering.

At the same time, mining in gravity should be required by the gameplay. If you can easily find everything in space, you will still use worm-like miners instead of dealing with the engineering required to mine on planets. In space we can still find lots of basic materials like iron, so we can build massive space ships, but not everything.

As for fitting into your own hole, I think the best approach would be having some kind of mega drill, like the Prototech drill in SE1. It could be PCU and performance efficient for large scale iron mining on asteroids, and there you would be easily capable of fitting into the hole it makes.

For planet-side mining, I really hope helicopter miners will just be a thing of the past and there won't even be a question about fitting into the hole they made. Mining with helicopters or rockets is already ridiculous imo. Fitting into the hole they made and continuing to mine makes even less sense.

In the end, easy mining is not the same thing as interesting mining or an interesting game as a whole.

If you find it boring to spend time engineering effective mining rigs and the logistics around them, then why bother with mining at all? There are other ways to play the game where you don't need to mine at all. And I hope the game will support those alternatives even more, rather than simplifying everything to the point where it becomes really boring.

What is exciting about pressing a button and digging into voxels with a flying ship? It was more like necessary work than interesting mining gameplay imo.

The mining gameplay should change and become more interesting, rather than just fixing problems in the legacy approach.

This is a problem.

You cannot place two drills next to eachother, leaving a block gap between them leaves voxels behind as the drill radii don´t overlap.

Yeah, it needs to be balanced. The thing is that new players will hit this problem...every single time, because it is a logical pathway with adding more drills, and they are destined to the drill's clipping with each other being too close...or to artifacts with a normal spacing. 100 percent. Veteran players know the tricks (wiggle/irregular offsets/mechanical blocks/platforms)...

...but artifacts causing problems down a deep hole for new players, in the dark, and the new players having no idea what is wrong...is bad. Simplest placeholder solution: Right click drilling radius = Left click drilling radius, for now. Long term, I like the 'voxel-hand clean-up solution' proposed, simple and elegant.