Digital Miner

The Digital Miner is a Mekanism machine that finds and mines only the blocks you’ve told it to, in a wide column around itself, without digging a pit to reach them. To set it up you’ll need to power it, add at least one filter, give it somewhere to put the items and press Start, as it won’t mine anything until all of those are done.

By default it searches 10 blocks out in every direction between Y 0 and Y 60, taking one block every 4 seconds for 400 FE/t (1,000 J/t). That means it’ll skip the Deepslate layers until you lower its Min Y, which is the setting that’s missed the most, and it’s covered in the setup steps below.

How to Make It

You’ll need 2 Atomic Alloys, a Basic Control Circuit, 2 Logistical Sorters, a Robit, 2 Teleportation Cores and a Steel Casing to craft it. The Atomic Alloys go in the top corners with the circuit between them, the Robit sits in the middle with a sorter on each side, and the Steel Casing goes between the two cores on the bottom row.

Digital Miner

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Robit

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Teleportation Core

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Logistical Sorter

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It’s the Atomic Alloy that makes this a late machine, as each Teleportation Core needs 2 of them on top of the 2 in the miner itself, and the Robit takes one more, so that’s 7 in total. You’ll find how those are made on the Alloys and Control Circuits page, and the Robit has a page of its own as well.

Once it’s placed, the miner takes up a space 3 blocks wide, 3 deep and 2 tall, so it’s worth clearing that area first. If you ever need to move it, sneak and right-click it with a Configurator in Wrench mode, as a Cardboard Box won’t pick this one up.

How It Works

The Digital Miner doesn’t dig its way down to anything. It’ll scan the whole area for blocks that match its filters, then remove them one at a time from wherever they are, leaving the stone around them untouched, and the items appear in the miner’s own 27 slots.

The area is a square centered on the miner, and its size comes from the radius, so the default radius of 10 covers 21 by 21 blocks, whereas the maximum of 32 covers 65 by 65. It works through that area a chunk at a time, taking the highest matching block in each one first, and the number left is shown next to “To mine” in its screen.

Power goes in through the left side, the right side or the bottom, and it won’t accept any from the back or top. While it’s running it’ll draw its energy every tick, not just when a block comes out, so one block costs 32,000 FE at the base speed. The miner only holds 20,000 FE itself, which is why it needs a steady supply instead of a charged buffer.

Setting It Up Step by Step

The steps below are in the order you’ll want to do them, as the config screen won’t stay open while the miner is busy mining, so the radius and the Y levels have to be set before you start it. Everything except the power and the Chest is done from the Digital Miner Config screen, which opens from the button in its main screen.

The output is the step that tends to go wrong, as the port is on the back of the miner’s upper row, in the middle, and not on the base block. Auto-eject is off on the miner until you turn it on, and then it’ll push items out twice a second into whatever inventory is touching that port.

Min Y and Max Y are able to go from the bottom of the world to the top, so in the Overworld that’s Y -64 up to 319. A lot of ores now sit below Y 0, like Diamonds and most of the Deepslate veins, so a miner left on its default range of 0 to 60 will miss them all.

Filters

There are three kinds of filter, and you’re able to add as many as you like. With no filter switched on, the search will finish straight away with nothing to mine, which looks like the miner is broken when it’s really just been told to look for nothing.

A Tag Filter set to c:ores/* is the one most players will want first, as it’ll catch every ore from every mod in a single filter. To mine only a few, you’d add one Tag Filter each, like c:ores/diamond and c:ores/osmium, or use Item Filters, which need the block itself placed in the filter’s slot.

Replace and Inverse mode

Each filter has a replace slot, where you’re able to name a block that’ll be put back where the mined one was, like Cobblestone. The miner takes those blocks from its own slots first, so you’d keep a few stacks inside it, and turning on Pull will let it take them from an inventory placed directly on top of the miner as well.

If “Require replace” is on for that filter, the miner will skip a block when it has nothing to put back, and its screen will say “Missing block”. A Stone Generator Upgrade is the easy way around that, as it’ll make Cobblestone or Stone for free whenever one of those is the replacement.

Inverse mode flips the filters around, so the miner will take every block that doesn’t match one. With a single filter for Stone, for example, it’d remove everything else in the area, and it has its own replace setting, so the same trick of filling the holes still works.

Speed and Energy

At the base speed the Digital Miner takes one block every 4 seconds for 400 FE/t, and three settings will raise that cost. They multiply together, so a miner with all three at their highest uses 19,200 FE/t before any upgrades are added.

Silk touch is a toggle in the config screen, and with it off you’ll get the normal drops, so ores come out as raw ore. That matters for Ore Processing, as an Iron or Osmium ore block gives 2 dust in an Enrichment Chamber, whereas it takes 3 of the raw ore to make 4. It’s the reason you might pay 12 times the energy for it.

Making the radius or the Y range smaller than the defaults won’t make it any cheaper, as 400 FE/t is the lowest it’ll go. A full search at radius 32 across the whole column will find a lot of blocks though, so the miner might be running for days before it needs moving.

Why It Stopped

When the Digital Miner isn’t mining, the status in its screen will usually tell you why. These are the reasons it’ll stop, with the most common ones first, and none of them need the miner to be broken and placed again.

Power is the one that catches people out, as a supply that’s even a little short will stop the miner completely rather than slowing it down. Replacement blocks can sit in the miner, on top of it, or come from a Stone Generator Upgrade.

After changing a filter, you’ll need to press Reset and then Start again, as the miner keeps working from its last search until it’s told to look again. The config screen closes itself while the miner is mining, so press Stop first if you need to change the radius or the Y levels.

Upgrades and Automation

The Digital Miner takes up to 8 Speed Upgrades, 8 Energy Upgrades, one Anchor Upgrade and one Stone Generator Upgrade. Speed Upgrades cost a lot of power on their own, so they’re best added together with the same number of Energy Upgrades.

In our reading of the code, the miner also has to hold a whole tick’s cost in its 20,000 FE buffer before it’ll run. So more than 6 Speed Upgrades shouldn’t work at all on their own, as it’s the Energy Upgrades that make that buffer bigger.

With an Anchor Upgrade the miner keeps its own chunk loaded, along with the chunk it’s currently mining, so it’ll carry on while you’re somewhere else. It’s one of only three machines that can take one, and the Machine Upgrades page has the recipes for all four.

For the output, a Logistical Transporter on the back port will carry items to storage, and a Quantum Entangloporter next to the miner is able to send both the items home and the power out to it. That’s what lets you leave a miner far from base. Once the ores are coming in, the Formulaic Assemblicator is the next machine along, as it’ll craft them into parts for you.

FAQ