Quarry Tutorial

[epgeek]

I set up a quarry on my world that is only bottlenecked by power demands and the occasional player interaction to clear bars and coal. I mentioned it on another thread, and started a new thread to describe it a little. It may help players new to quarries a bit.

Placement is everything: do you want a lot of coal? Tin/copper? Titanium/Nickle/Gold? Use a surveyor to find a good spot! I found a location with little coal and lots of ore at ~400m. It turned out to be lithium and gold. Also be sure to check the holobase for mining equipment!


The business end:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=708886632

I later upgraded to 8 turbines, but it was still bottlenecked down deep. HECF is matter-moved from the right from my closed-loop HECF circuit (missiles are on their own, as is the OET charging). Single-stage matter movers are more than able to keep up.

There are two material processing centers - the "right" is in the background. I found the quarry heavily favored the "left" side that I'm standing above in the above screenshot, and is shown in this screenshot:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=708886669

Single-stage matter-mover beams items into the center hopper. Three powered conveyors pull the items out, though really regular conveyors could have been used instead. The filter at the top is for gems, though it's far more likely the powered conveyors would pull out any gems before the filter can. The three tubes feed hoppers with regular filters on all five sides - ores on the top, coal (combustibles, actually) on the bottom, and garbage on the three sides.

The coal line on the right clogged a couple times. By that point I had 20k coal with little use, so I started changing the "garbage" filters to "all" until I was through the coal vein. It doesn't seem that macerating coal gives any ores, but that didn't really surprise me.

The macerator outputs converge to a hopper attached to a smelter, which will smelt whatever it has enough of in the hopper - no filtering. I started with a single smelter with T4 induction cap, but it backed up while going through the ore veins. I made two more - for symmetry. Bars were picked up manually ever so often and fed back into the main production system if it ran low. I considered an advanced filter bank, but that just doesn't fit my play style.

The quarry hit a depth of almost 1200m while I was busy elsewhere, so I turned it off. I'll probably move the quarry forward from the power plant, use a few MK3 LPTs to power it, and change the matter movers to powered conveyors and pipes.

This was probably the most fun project I took on, even if all I got out of it in the end was a couple thousand bars. The quarry mod is very tempting, but I just don't want to risk disabling achievements right before embarking on frozen factory, which is somewhat common on other games.

[PhearFactor]

Is that a old screenshot of the filter system? It seems you have no conveyor's going to the hoppers on top. That doesn't work anymore. Easy to fix anyway.

So don't you get bottlenecks when you hit ore? I guess if you do it is easy to expand in this setup. I like it.

[epgeek]

Thank you. :) Yes, those screenshots are a couple weeks old, from before the conveyor/hopper fix.

The ore filters should run 50 ore per minute each, so 150 ore per side, same as the (theoretical) speed of the quarry. However the "right" side definitely had a lot of gold and lithium - the two veins it hit, so I suspect it would have bottle necked with only one of the material processing centers. Otherwise, I don't think it was bottlenecking at any point due to material processing capability, except twice when I caught all the coal hoppers full. I plan to change those filters to feed into the macerators when I fire it up next since I don't need more coal on this world.

That said, this thing needs a TON of juice to run full speed. I think it's 150 plus the depth per block removed, so the quarry alone needs almost 3000 pps down at 1000m. Then there's the matter mover, motorize conveyors, macerators, and smelters.... I would have to pull out Excel to add up the actual power, but suffice it to say that the eight turbines and one MK2 organic solar are not enough! Of note, the mattermover is the same speed as the powered conveyor, but something like 10 times the energy per item, so there is some energy savings to be had there.