Hey. i see the design and the flaw in vanilla. i can see a fix for vanilla. A Rotating head might do the trick to fix those pesky remains

100% Function, 0% Bling. It so unapologetically hideous, but seems to work great - i love it.

after only ~500 hours in game this is one of the most impressive deep space miners i have ever seen

The purity of the design is a thing of beauty. Truly this is engineering, essentials no waste.

I've utilized some of the building techniques that you've shown here, like the thruster placement and narrow profile for efficient through-mining, yet they weren't anywhere near as thoughtfully and elegantly built as your mining rig here! I'll definitely be utilizing this design during my next space survival playthrough.

It’s the most breathtakingly beautiful design I’ve ever seen in space engineers. I was just searching for large scale excavation methods for an underground base, and this definitely isn’t that, but I’m immensely pleased with what I found instead

Glad to see someone else using timer blocks to respawn TP. Nice miner, looks great and I will be using. So thankful you have uploaded a NO DLC version. Great work, thanks for the time that was clearly invested in learning all of these techniques and folding them into one Maximus Miner

A quick tip for the right click destroy/erase voxel: if you right-click the drills then go in the inventory of the ship, release the right button only in the inventory of the ship, then the drills will keep on being in destruction mode even when you are no longer in the ship inventory menu. It will stop if you right-click and release again or get out of the cockpit. I find this useful when I want to drill long tunnels and not constantly pressing the right buttons for long periods of time.

I love seeing people perfect their designs and creating the most efficient crafts they can

For utility work, I do like to have more braking thrust than forward thrust. Makes them a little bit easier to control, especially when in full load. Nevertheless, a wonderful design!

Painfully simple but the brilliance beind it is just amazing. A truly efficient, perfect machine. Well done sir.

Nice miner design and i learned some tricks for my next large grid miner :) Many thanks for sharing

Well, I didn't find that boring, at all. I love this format of talking through the design. Wish more KZfaqrs did it. Yeeting stone away with a grav gen is cool and something I hadn't thought of but I usually build small grid miners that launch from a carrier. I may have to try this.

I made a similar design 2 years ago. But it was a remote-controlled miner, using small blocks. This is an effective and efficient design for large scale mining. I like it. Nice job!

Great explanation of your ship! Well thought out, and thank you for the hows and whys! Most people just give you a tour but not the logistics! Great job!

Ahh, love the complete function over looks, just how I like it

Wow! What a great design. Minimal but fully functional and then some. I’ll definitely be borrowing of your ideas. Great work.

Awesome video dude , great job, 😎👍

You have done Gods work good sir. Anyone who has played this game has run into mining issues. Thank you!

Interior turrets also make for good rotating cameras. As you travel through space you can zoom in on passing asteroids to see if they might have an ore on the surface, and you can do this without having to move the entire ship using just a static camera.

man, ive been trying to figure out how to streamline a miner behind its drills for 5 years, thank you, i will be putting this build to heavy use

Using timer blocks to get round the resplendent system is genius, I never would have thought of that!

certainly has all the bells and whistles you could possibly want on a miner. definitely well thought out. a bit too all encompassing for my tastes though. best miner design i had was a dedicated atmospheric minor with tomes of storage. later on i put hydro thrusters on it but definitely did the trick.

I made a similar one a while ago, but on hydrogen. It wasn't self-sufficient or anything, in terms of refining/crafting, but I had a O2/H2 generator, a hydrogen generator for charging the onboard battery, a large container and 4 drills. Later I realized the potential and expanded it to 30-ish drills, and it's a beast, that also clips the audio, which sounds very unpleasant. Note that I only play singleplayer, so some features here are completely useless to me, which means the miner can be that much more compact in my case, and I am willing to spend 7 minutes getting back from an asteroid to my base, which is definitely not an excuse to not have a jumpdrive... Yours is much more refined, and the forward/backwards thruster placement is indeed genius, good job!

I really like your design well done. I'm new to all this, the drill tip was actually so useful I always find myself with so much stone I don't need 😭

Great design. Can't wait to try and replicate it and have mine morph into a giant pos. I really glad I caught that timer block tip!!!!

man i saw this video very early playing this game and i've made dozens of ships based off this design lol. good stuff.

Holy shit dude. Been looking for a design like this for a long time. This thing is awesome

Im impressed of all the thoughts and experience that went into this. Big props.

I personally wouldn't design like this BUT I do like the gravity generator idea, that's a nifty idea and I will be using that: good call.

Your miner is one of the most efficient designs that I have seen. It definitely looks like it will get the job done. Just in case it happens to you where only one drill or weapon works. There is a little known command and that's the MMB. I believe it's for (for example) when you have two weapons on your ship and only want to fire one for whatever reason. I'm sure it could be used for other purposes as well. I use the left click (Harvest) and right click (Excavate) method to clear out the stone from around the ore deposits as well. I've used your system to mine, with good success but sometimes also with mixed results. When the drills "bumped" into the yet to be mined material, the speed would drop and it would eventually come to a stop. My semi-automatic mining system differs from yours because of this reason. I have a fleet of mining drones equipped with, besides the necessary equipment, a sensor, two timer blocks and a extra small thruster set on override in the back. I call them worms because they go through asteroids like worms through apples. It works in this manner. The sensor detects the asteroid and starts what I call the pulse timer. The timer has three commands. One is to turn the drills on. then turn On/Off the pulse thruster and the last one is to restart the timer. When the asteroid is detected the pulse timer turns the pulse thruster on for a few seconds to get the miner moving at around .50 ms and then shuts it off. the drills gently bumps into the asteroid and mines a chunk out. By that time the timer repeats and pushes the miner further into the tunnel. The second timer is for canceling the mining. If coming out the other side and the sensor no longer detects the asteroid and just shuts off the pulse thruster, the pulse timer will just fire it up again. If it stops the pulse timer, the pulse thruster may be on and it'll just keep going. The sensor also triggers the second timer which stops the pulse timer, turns off the pulse thruster and turns off the drills. After that I just clear the drone from the asteroid and set it's auto pilot to head back to base. Other than to check on the drone's mining progress from time to time and to dock it in its docking port when it returns, it is pretty much a hands free operation. One thing that I don't understand is that the sensors will detect "asteroid" voxels but doesn't detect "planet and moon" voxels, at least from my experience. One might say that it is a hold back from the old days before planets but isn't a voxel a voxel? I mean for all intent and purposes, isn't a planet just a big asteroid with different textures?

Wow, this is such a clean and utilitarian setup. I'm not very good at building ships even after almost 700 hours 😅 so seeing this kind of "simple" ship being so functional and well built is really awesome!

This is quite literally the first ship I ever built on my own in space engineers. I didn't have the jump drive camera or respawn teleporter. I also didn't have the stone ejector since I actually processed all of it. I didn't deem it necessary for respawning since I had the Ibis respawn shuttle. I did lose the ship because while I was mining the ibis was destroyed and I suffocated because I didn't think to add an o2h2 generator and couldn't find where my ice went in time. I also used 3rd person indeed of camera and had an extra drill there.

I’ve made a similar miner, it had a big drilling head, was hydrogen powered, hauled 3 large cargo containers, had a refinery, a jump drive, a reactor, even an assembler for field repairs, it served great on the server I played on until the server died... it even had ports for basic defensive weaponry

Absolutely amazing ship! Great job man

I particularly like the indented forward and reverse thrusters to keep your profile fitting neatly behind the drills.

I used to build this type of miner all the time back in the day. Though I would make it SUUUUUUPER long. Lots of onboard refineries, blast furnaces, and assemblers. I like to cover it in glass "Armor". Slightly less clangtastic, but more importantly it makes it shiny!

If you are collecting a large amount of stone and it clogs the queue, it will start refining stone. Make it so that its whitelisted to eject gravel too

I wouldn't have believed when you said 8 years of experience until I watched the whole video

Good design, my favorite miner has always been the same, a 3x3 bore drill, but never used a refinery on it, this is ingenious, mine was just 9drills + 20small ions per side + cockpit, ore detector, 2gyros, 4smallreactors, surv kit + 1large cargo + 6small ions (reverse) + top/bottom connectors + 3small ions, 1 large ion. No conveyors, just 1 large cargo and small cargos. Good job. 👍👍👍

Fantastic design!!!

After a 1000h in game, I also have designed my fully self-sufficient miner, but I focused more on the design rather than functionality. I often use the respawn trick to travel, although my timer block is always on and it just loops, so when I need to respawn, I only have to turn the survival kit off, and I know for sure that the timer block will turn it back on eventually.

I used to use a miner almost exactly like that but I do a couple things differently now. I use the five drills in a straight row and do "rake" mining, as I only stop for surface deposits pretty much or right click if needed, and I employ the basic refineries for stone with sorters set in such a way so I can still use the full refinery with yield modules with stone, and I dump gravel instead of stone. It actually refines it faster than it mines it, and the ingots are very much worth it to me. I actually never mine iron, nickel, or silicon. ore because stone is so common, I get enough while mining cobalt, gold, silver, and uranium. So for me space engineers has like four ores, or five including ice lol. Another pro tip is I only use ice for H2, I get all my O2 from either farms, or a vent set to depressurize and suck it out of any planet except for the one moon. Makes H2 a bit cheaper, but I can easily use ice in emergencies. :) Hope these tips are interesting!

This reminds me of my drill ship Glassy. Its 3x3 like yours, but a bit smaller and simply made. It has a h2\o2 gen, spherical grav gen, 1 small reactor, a few small cargos, and 1 large cargo. It is due for an upgrade and I was thinking of adding a survival kit to it. Oh, the reason it is called Glassy is because I put glass all over it to act as armor to protect it as I drill and bump around. Last update however has changed something and now the large cargo seems to take damage any time I bump any part near the front. I think my new version will have armor plates rather than glass. I recommend doing something similar to yours, especially on a server. You never know when Lag and Clang will throw a party on your grid

Note: "Official" servers and "vanilla" servers are not the same thing. This ship is buildable by one player on any non-Keen vanilla server.

Nice functional concept !

First: Excellent design, thanks a lot for sharing, we are still using one ship in your original design!! Then I took your design, rebuilt it to H2 thrusters, replaced the refinery with tanks and more cargo. That makes the miner usable on moons up to 1mio kg total weight (of course it can't survive totally on its own in case of damages this way). PS: Simply attaching a flying tank as ore detector makes exploration of asteroids a lot faster

First i was like "whats this after 8 years?" But i just didnt expect it to be practical and efficient to the max. After hearing your thoughts it quickly was obvious that this is not just a regular cube, its used a lot of knowledge and basically minimized everything else and it surely works perfectly as "insurance". I like that idea. Its also a good example for new players for what is possible to do.

8 years for a starting miner? Good job!

this helped me very much, thank you

I have a trick I use when controlling the drills with the mouse: if you enter into the ship’s menu while holding down the button, the drills will continue to work without holding down the button and they will keep working until you exit out of the menu _and_ click a mouse button, or when you leave the cockpit. I use this when controlling one of my stationary mining rigs with multiple pistons, rotors, and hinges. With this ship, you could use it along with your “cruise control” to auto-clear a bunch of voxel.

I've never thought of using the grav gen to toss the stone further before. Now I'll be incorporating it into my builds.

When right click mining, press I for the info panel and let go. It right click mines until you stop it.

Dunno why i’m getting so many Space Engineer videos, but i’m loving this. Also, love the design

I did a similar miner, less advanced (no jump nor cruise, well manual cruise) but with an array of ejectors in the back as a deffensive weapon, giving a spacial delectable new meaning to "eat my dust" for undesired followers. But, yeah, I made it way too big (solo), what can I say, I was bored of boring so I made my mouth bigger. I also included a projector that has a scale of 5 blocks units (red-white), 100 blocks long, and that is a size of the ship frame, cage, so I can plan efficiently the entry points and avoid overlapsing, even the exit point. This game is way too fun. Now I need a better computer to use my miner, yep!

You can quickly and easily modify it to work with 2, maybe 3 drills by giving it a rotating head. A 5 drill head would be gravy ! 4 outer, 1 center and youll have some wiggle room in the tunnel with your miner. I imagine its got enough mass behind it to keep it from locking up and turning the ship. I think I would at least cover it in plates or huge sheets of glass though (since apparently its a good armor) and sneak in some stratigic welders to keep it fixed to prevent wiggle damages to the importaint bits. Another thing you can do is route the stone into basic refineries instead of ejectors to maximize your haul.

reminds me of one i made very simular . i made it 5x5 the main stuff was 3x3 like yours but it was covered in heavy blocks all the way around for added protectionmaking it 5x5. used it on a very hostile server. very nicely done . and its funny becuase it also took me a while to come to the worm miner setup as well.

Awesome ship. I can't wait to use some of your ideas. One thing I would do personally is to put a conveyor sorter between your main connector and conveyor system and set it to blacklist nothing, so you don't accidentally drain all the stone off your connected grid if you forget to turn off your garbage sorter. But I tend to mine a lot of stone in my bases so that may not be useful to anyone but me.

Very nice, i have some designs like this that keep evolving over the years. They are special too me haha

Your mine craft skill know no bounds

Very neat!

Great vid. Thanks.

back in the days when I still played the game my favorite designs used the bare essential to keep the ship small and had a support craft outside the asteroid for extra storage and long range travel, bringing everything with you all the time always seemed inefficient, not sure if with the limitations now a days such design would be illegals or not, haven't played in quite a while

Really like the design. i made a ship in this kinda theme but went with 6 thrusters in a messy random placement. I went with 5 drills and just have it rotate to deal with the voxels that poke into the hole I'm drilling. Never thought of using the gravity gen. will definitely try that out. Thanks for sharing this, makes me want to go clean up my design. lol

Nice build!

Interesting. Most miners I make are based off the main idea of my original "explorer" ship using hydrogen and a not so good drill output, cause its designed to be able to survive combat. I play on lots of more "modded" servers with a 13 drill limit and more centralized mining zones. Nice to see an exact opposite idea maximizing the other aspects of a miner

Very Good Video !

Hello, i am new to the game and i learned a lot of things, very thx for the video.

Well done.

18:36 then you can put a collector at the end of your tunnel so you can get all of the stuff from the stone your mining

I have done that timer death travel a lot. Basic idea is to set up different delay on every spawn locations and go when they come online. You only need like 10 second window every 1-2 minutes for respawn and it also help save battery on some basic stations.

Legendary.

Awesome thanks mate

Im glad you take pcu into account, very interesting ship.

I like to setup the gyroscope to override and bind the "override on/off" to the hotbar so the ship doesn't spin in any direction. I do this because I've seen my miner moving a bit when the drills are spinning. This miner (one reason is this being a large grid, I assume) doesn't seem to be affected that much by the drills. But small grid miners move a lot more. So when I imagine turning your ship into a small grid for the early game and combining your thruster setup with my gyroscope "technique" it would work out (as long as your ship can be converted to small grid with all or most of the features). I'll try it :D Great video! And great job at putting this together! Subscribed and thumbs up! I wanna see more! Have a great one!

"Best" seems to have a lot of limits tides mostly due to the current state of the game. Back when I last played before the whole CPU limits and drill count limit I would make massive miner that had and 11x11 grid with drills on it that could mine out whole roids extremely quickly. It had 8 refineries it with 8 assemblers and it could mine right through the asteroid like yours. It was before jump drives so the long time out to the roid as to stay protected hiding in space was the best way so being about 20-30 minute flight away from roids means you want to make a big haul. After like 1-2 hours mining would take several hours to process it all and best part it could be done on ship. The other cool think was drills were on a connector so I could detach them. :) Then attach on large grid of welders. Thus quick swap out miner goes to builder. ;) I like to go big and 5 drill limit is cringy. Even my starter miners would have more than that. Not sure I could really get back into SE with those kind of limits. Not even sure what sort of CPU count my ships would have in the system.

nice, simple, i added one layer of heavy plates to protect and a magnet under (always help to lock something or somewhere)

haha friend came into server saying he build a miner i immediately recognized it as the one you built :P

1:25 having them on an advanced rotor can be used to compensate for the sides getting hit, you'd just have to move a bit slower

Not bad dude. For the auto respawn if you backspace suicide twice in a row you will go the to respawn screen.

A magnetic pad is worth having. They come in handy. It also lets you use the miner as a tug to jump other vehicles.

I've been playing over 5000 hrs and in my experience I would just leave refineries on a station because they use to much power and invest in a second jump drive and having a antenna helps with ore detector range. But that's my experience.

I love your "No Nonsense" approach. Do you have a PRE-Nuclear similar style drilling rig? I'm doing my first fully-true Survival playthrough and I'm looking to build my first Asteroid Miner. I love your elegant and simplistic design!

Sleek design! Could be handy for building a base inside an asteroid for sure.

"This is the closest thing you can get to automated mining without scripts" I built years a go a miner that went through an asteroid then turned around until it detected voxel and went through again until cargo was full then it went home (tried but usually stucked cus pathfinding...) it all operated by timers.

Something I recall doing a long time back was setting a gyro overide to slowly rotate me as I dig through. Though, it wasn't out of knowing the tiny voxel thing you're talking about. I used miners in a line. Still, might be the trick to use for this setup.

If you have your SK timer always on and counting then there's no risk of forgetting it when switching SK off. Good mining design, very clean and has everything you need. It's the perfect starter ship.

Im happy to see someone who has embraced function over aesthetics as well I have a ship thats rather similar, 3x3 profile and long with a jump drive Main difference is that mine is hydro propulsion so it can function on planets too but it doesnt have any production aside from an H2/O2 gen Id suggest you look into making an H2 version as well, gives it even more functionality. And I dont even call mine a miner, I call it a "workship" because you can just change the tools at the front to whatever you need But I do like your ship a lot I approve it as a real survival design

If you can get 9 drills on a grid, I would suggest instead going with a 3x3 diamond array. The drills have enough radius to cover the space between blocks when checkerboarded, creating a nice smooth diamond shaped tunnel without the little edges that squared drills leave behind. This leaves room for a light, camera and detector right on the front while also giving you a bit more room to build wider and taller. If you're patient and can move with some finesse, you might consider using a rotary drill. Putting drills on two or four arms with a rotor allows you to greatly expand your drilling radius with minimal drills, though it does require you mine slowly and allow the drill to complete its revolution before moving so you don't snap the arm off.

The design is sound overall, but I recommend an outer frame of heavy armor that has angled edges to prevent getting stuck. The heavy armor provides bump resistance so incidental contact won't damage your ship, and the angled edges prevent you from getting stuck if you have to back out. I did this with great effect using my small-grid Advanced Miner, and there is no reason it cannot be scaled up. I won't be a dick and leech off your views by linking it unless you give me permission, and it's an older design (I last updated it in 2019 but nothing that would affect it has changed since then) but the basic concepts can be easily applied to other miners.

Very good

The only piece of info I can give is that when you are erasing voxels with right click, you can actually press I from inventory as you right click, when you close your inventory, your drills will continue to do the erasing without you needing to press the right click. You can set it up to do an .. auto erase or something.

Havent played SE for like 5 years but this looks awesome

effective and its not gonna be to material demanding in comparison to the other mining ships i have found i love its mechanics too i will use this myself

A bit lengthy but a very nice mining ship. I love the deatailed features which appear very useful. However I was wondering how you are producing oxygen when this is supposed to be a backup base/starting point.

Try placing 5 drill heads in a line with a gap between each head, then place that on a rotor and you can carve a huge hole, normally engulfing an entire node in one go, check out the work shop for my design called the workman

Maaan, I absolutely love this and will be building it from scratch. Thank you for spending such an incredible amount of time on it and then sharing. I do, however, have one question. Am I correct in assuming that there is a line of conveyors down the middle? It seems to make sense to me. Whoops! Nvm. I see the assembler in there now, sorry.

Its a nice design, but I would probably go in a different direction for the role of the ship. I would have a larger mining command/refinery type ship with maybe a pair of the miners docking side by side. That would free up the ship to be specialised to just mining and not need the other modules. As a single ship miner though it looks like it works well.

reminds me of my pioneer class of all-in-one survival ships

I've seen some and made some good miners but nothing that could refine and jump like that design that is some good shit right there