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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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