On The Pointlessness Of All But The Most Select Of Mining Equipment

Created by: 9600bauds

The precious metal pickaxes are terrible. Gold&silver are only found in mining complexes, which means you already have something better than them by the time you find them. The diamond pickaxe is a special mention in that it can be made in a Protolathe, which might trick some none-the-wiser scientist into making it... But it's twice as slow as a diamond drill and cannot dig walls or soil. It doesn't even do more damage. Why? The plasma cutter: Now this is a weird one. It's just as fast as a jackhammer, but that means if you can get the plasma to make R&D construct one, you could instead skip the middleman and redeem the plasma to buy a jackhammer. The weird part is that it also welds walls at half the speed of a welder. I'm struggling to think what use could I give that, since I can just get a welder or a diamond drill instead. Disappointingly, it's not even good at cutting limbs.

The resonator is way too tricky and risky to use (requires getting up close and careful timing) when you can just get a gun that does the killing better, and it's too unwieldy to use as pickaxe replacement when you can get a jackhammer instead. It'd be half-decent if it triggered when something walks over it, but then it'd be absolutely obscene against players. Nanotrasen Minebot: This guy seems good on paper, but he's dumb. Really dumb. He takes a good while to realize anything is going on, loves to freeze in place for a few seconds, and is bad at following you. The best use I can give him is drag him behind myself and try to get him to pick up what I tunnel into, but I have to stop constantly for him to slowly realize he's standing over dug ores and he loves to wander off and break your grip.

Ripleys. God, Ripleys. I'm silently glad roboticists very rarely make one of these for you unless you ask them to, because I don't have the heart to tell them that it sucks. I mean, it's an awesome giant digging mech with a drill for an arm, I want to love it. But for actually mining, it's so bad. He's clunky and slow to move, sure, he's a mech, but he's also so slow to DRILL. Here's a comparison between a Ripley with a diamond drill and a guy on foot, no hyperzine, with a diamond drill. http://puu.sh/hSB7U/a1e4ae6106.webm This is, not showing the time it takes to actually get your mech from and to the 'roid. The 3 wide digging isn't even that useful, because you never need to mass-dig like the 'roid was a quarry. Most of the time you shaft mine, and when you need to clear, you have Gibtonite. I'm sorry, but even if I get a Ripley handed to me, I won't use it, because it's that bad.

What Does All Of This End Up In? Go out, don't even bother getting a basic mining drill because it's only 33% faster than a pickaxe, strike the miniasteroid field until you have diamond, get diamond drill, if diamond drill is not available, get sonic jackhammer. That's about it, because everything else sucks.