basic efficient setup for local mining

[kaomera]

I am playing through the tutorial and it feels like everything is going incredibly slowly - I have tried expanding the base to increase production, but it does not seem to really be helping, there seems to be some bottleneck with basic production (mining and smelting) but I can't easily figure out what the issue is - I seem to have ore piling up in the miners, but not enough that they actually fill up and trigger dropping off at the storage facility - which seems to indicate that I have enough transport bots and enough mining, but my smelters don't seem to be running consistently for some reason?

I do not feel like I should need to go as far as some of the remote mining setups I have seen on youtube (plus I am not sure if I can actually access all of the required options yet?), I am mostly wondering: how many miners / transports do I need per production building (the basic one - I do not remember exactly what it is called) and do I need storage buildings and/or dedicated transports to keep things running

[Quarzon]

How early of the game are we talking?

Do not use transport bots to pick up ores from miners. Disable logistics (wifi symbol) on your miners so they do not deliver ore to multiple buildings, instead assign a single storage to every few miners (store button in row above wifi).
This way your miners will only travel when they are full, and transporters will carry full stacks instead of single units.

Unlock and produce dashbots as soon as possible - basic workers are extremely clunky and can cause traffic jams.

Don't build too many factories/smelters of the same type if you struggle with particular products. Resources are spread across the buildings evenly, so if you are having a shortage it will take longer for any production to happen.

Try to use solar/wind power as soon as possible, eliminating the need for having miners to supply crystals to crystal power plants.

Also, if you happen to have any of those large nodes (with couple thousands of metal) you can place a 2S buildings next to them, with a miner module and fabricator set to smelting to have an instant access to ingots. You can deconstruct it later when no longer needed.

[kaomera]

Thanks! OK, moving single items may well be the main issue - that explains why building more bots didn't seem to help that much. I actually have a bunch of basic miners as well as a few dashbots - I will try deconstructing the basic bots and then build more dashbots if I need them, or at least transfer mining duties over to the basic bots, I think I know how to do that (drag the mining device out of the inventory into a storage and then put it on a new bot, or can you just drag it directly from one bot to another? I guess I will find out)

Do you have any idea of what might be an efficient ratio of miners to production? I suppose I can just set up the miners and then add more buildings one at a time until they start to falter.

I don't have solar or wind yet - and it did not occur to me that I could put the miner module on a building, I'll have to give that a try

[rgarrett]

i use the buildings around the node trick too but decon them is a pain and tedious i dono how to do it easily

[Blueberry Muffins!]

I am playing through the tutorial and it feels like everything is going incredibly slowly - I have tried expanding the base to increase production, but it does not seem to really be helping, there seems to be some bottleneck with basic production (mining and smelting)

My top two guesses are both: you're not managing your delivery traffic.

random tip up front: put the first fab in the delivery scout and rush building more fabs.

The game takes a "sink or swim" approach to learning how its logistics nets work. If we accept that as The Right Way To Learn This Stuff, the rest of this is pure spoilers. The very short form is, anything connected to a logistic net is available for delivery Right Now, and an order is going to be prepared for some next free bot, the instant any demand appears, to deliver that much, or if less than needed then however much came available (I think only from the nearest source).

The important part of this is the assignment takes the form of a delivery order that gets put on the logistics net's queue. Bring up the `F` command center page, pick the Orders tab. New orders get put at the bottom of that list, bots take orders off the top.

You get one beat to see the problem coming . . .

If your fab wants iron, and the iron is coming available one at the time, each time a new iron comes available an order will be entered for that delivery.

The only time you want a teeny order showing up on the logistics net is if the source and destination are like *right* next to each other. Your starter scouts can mine fast enough to kinda mask the problem, but the t1 miners? nnnnope. My mine-out-the-starter-iron-field setup is the command center four tiles away from the big bunch o' ore deposit(s). The row right next to the ore is for miners. The next row is for the storage depot I'm going to build and home all the built-later miners to, after taking them off the logistics net. The next row is the traffic and delivery lane. The next row is for the three 1S (later 2S) smelters I'm'a build to stick smelter fabs in.

Access to the command center is along the diagonals at its corners, the three around the corner wind up dedicated to plate making, but I stop the initial rush on those when I've got one in a 1S and can toggle the fab in the scout and/or command center as needed. When I can build 1M's I put two uplinks along the back wall (farthest from iron, crystal, plateau), the command center runs all the assemblers and robotics assemblers until I can build 2Ms with enough storage to feed them. I don't bother with the 1M1S,

[Vinik]

Mmmh i'm still studying it ^^ But about MINERS you're wrong.
if they are CONNECTED to LOGISTIC :
They carry when full ONLY if you setup a storage in their own-orders. Without that they'll stay near ores without delivering.
BUT if a command show up they'll go honor it and they can also stop to gather when the node is depleted :S because they can transport commands.
in fact without being connected to logistic network they look like to be a "mobile storage" :D with other drones coming to take their ressources when needed by a command.

Check Tutorial & Codex for more stuffs but Codex isnt so precise to how-to-do automation. i found some scripts into a behavior component in buildings on map. Only transferts for now. But i'll check to do a "Mining Script".

it still need more studying to figure out nicely how it work.

[Quarzon]

And that's exactly what you should avoid, since it will cause your logistic bots to travel and pick up single ores whenever something is mined instead of taking whole stacks from storage.

[Burnz]

Yeah, having miners connected is a bad idea, you'll have them move around instead of mining. If you set a storage they can go to they will go when they are full. I disable all their inventory slots except one, that way they mine up to full one stack and deliver their load to a storage they're assigned to.

Also as you said, if they are connected, and if they can't find more to mine they will be added to the pool of available transport bots, making it a real hassle to go around and finding them.

[Luke ✞ Jesus Saves ✞]

Thanks for the tip! I didn't realize I could mount a miner onto a building! That's crazy.