I added compatibility for 1.5. Sorry but I don't have time to test it with just vanilla 1.5. I could only test it with 1.5 + all DLCs, including Anomaly. If you haven't got Anomaly and run into any problem, please let me know here!

Have fun!

Hi everyone. Great news about 1.5 and Anomaly. I don't have time to play and test the beta branch right now. I read through the 1.5 patch note and it seems like my mods might not be affected. If you find any compatibility problem, please let me know and I will spend time to fix it up properly. Thank you in advance! When 1.5 officially drops, I will update the mod ASAP.

Very understandable Mods are tricky business but I figured it's worth asking.

I am sorry. It is something that I cannot implement due to my technical limit :(

I was wondering if you wanted to put "Do until you have X" feature, could be useful to keep colonies from accidentally getting too much wealth or over-mining this mine could set the "valuable mineral limits" for colonies.

Would that be something you'd consider or that's not that easy to setup?

@Spoons Thanks for reporting. The target of this mod is to assign a billed deep drill to a pawn and that is it. I don't really know if all the other bill options would work with the mod. Sorry to dissapoint you :(

@ec#2718 on Discord this is actually a very good idea. I would love to have it. Unfortuantely, I am not sure if I can do it. Maybe someone would give me some pointer on how to.... that would be great!

I would like to add that removing the skill limit on the billed drills allow them to be queued up for work by pawns at any distance.

I don't know if anything I'm about to say is correct, but I feel as though the pawn idling while drills can be used issue is caused by limiting the drills to certain skill ranges, but I use a certain number of mods that may cause issues with it.

Ones in question being work tab and endless growth. I feel having more than 20 on the skill slider along with having a low priority (above 4) causes some issues with pawns looking at the drill job.

https://gist.github.com/93680ab2523151d4d750853c0e43469c Here's a log with my full mod list in case you'd like to look into it, but I understand if that combination of mods just won't work together.

Is there any chance of you getting this working with the 'do until' settings? Especially for chunks, it'd be nice to be able to prioritize deep-drilling better compared to other tasks ...

@M3galodon Do you still have the problem? I have been playing for several 1.4 games now and the mod works as I expected. I can have the drills at the edge of the map and desinated pawns have no problem getting there.

I don't have many mods installed though... No Pick up and haul, no Haul explicitly (which is a pain, but it conflict with Work Tab mod). I have no mod that can interfere with work pattern or path finding at all.

@M3galodon Thank you for reporting! I will have a look at this issue during the weekend.

The distance will vary per pawn/drill. If I manually assign a pawn to a billed deep drill, I can cancel the order when they are near the drill, they will still work it and leave for sleep/food as expected. I have to do it 2-3 times per in-game day, which is annoying but better than the vanilla drill system.

I have about 30 mods and no DLC's

@wowhvb Just installed it mid game. Colonists that are due to work on the Billed Deep Drills are idling even if they could do other stuff that's lower priority. They will work if I manually assign them, but return to idle if the forced order is cancelled before they reach the drill. Same behavior on multiple colonists.

Upon further testing, it looks like they will work the billed drills just fine as long as they are within 13 tiles of the billed deep drill they are supposed to work at. Anything I could try to fix it?

nice thanks

@absent1 yeah, it works with Ideology. I only started making mod after Ideology came out.

does this work ok with ideology? I love this idea to not artificially inflate my base value =)

well that's why I searching for mods so I could use again the drills, there is a ton of resources underground I do not want to waste

It could be one the mods or settings that leads to my easy deep drill infestations. I will check things again.

But yeah, mountain roof infestations are HUGE pains for me. Even now, when playing with tunnel AND dark percepts together, my bases are still out in the open. That how much I hate them

So, after I basically dumped the idea to use drills again till I got some mods that modifies how infestation occurs, so I switched to use the Quarry mod. Til well now I creating a new modpack cause the ideology dlc (sorry for 3 posts but Steam have a character limit per post.

I did not lost my colony but I got severely damaged that I was just thinking on abandon the place and start over because for sure any other event would occur soon. Not to say it was a melee fight and because it was a inner attack my defense turrets did just worked when I tried to move my 2 warriors outside for luring the bugs out and let my defenses do some killing, still they got some friendly fire.

@wowhvb in my experience no, they are BIG infestations just like any raid, they scale on your colony cost (again on my experience), and I call risky because they complety wiped my main room were I crammed the start of my colony and I extended around the central room but I did not move all the workbenches still, the main dinning hall was there as well, the quantity of pawns/infestation was like 6 pawns, and only 2 were capable of full combat with bionics and special organs that in game mechanics could be like every advanced bionics but lore wise they are hi engineered organs, like 10-15 insects vs 1 pawn, not counting the smallest scarabs, basically I could not see the floor cause it was a bug carpet, some roofs collapsed cause the infestation break some supports when they pop-up, the not capable pawns were obliterated in just a death round were they got surrounded with no hope of escaping and turned into a bloody pulp.

@Etherdreamer Please correct me if I am wrong, but isn't deep drill infestations have much fewer bugs and scale way slower than mountain roof ones?

My pawns are in prestige armors with lengendary guns and deep drill infestations only have less than 20 bugs, with only a few big ones. Even when it was in the middle of the base, 6 pawns can clear it out in less than a minute (real time), before the bugs can do any damage at all.

Where as during mid phase of the same game (i.e first few bionics), a mountain roof infestation spawns 10 hives, reduces the temple to rubble and puts several pawns in hospital beds for days.

It is really a low risk way of getting materials late vanilla-ish game. Annoying? Yes. Risky? No.

So there is no "low risk" in fact is high risk using a drill, event if you manage to destroy the infestation, recovering is too expensive on severely injured pawns, destroyed buildings what very likely are going to be more expensive to repair/rebuild for just some steel (or raw iron if you're using mods), expending ton of medicine, probably the lost of a limb you need to replace asap cause your important pawn cannot be on the bed too long cause is vital for the colony.

@wowhvb maybe is because there is several mods out there that like "Deep core drilling were you can drill any resource or even item with a configurable output but by using a shtload of energy and space" also yeah people find really annoying (as well me) to work alot on building an almost impenetrable base, but get insta rekt or get your nice room destroyed by an roulette event that is annoying and for some reason they choose your best quality room to specifically fk ur day and not getting a proper way to get a defense from them, the only way to not get that annoyance is just not use any deep drill at all. If you read all around the community people do hate that event at lot.

Find a way to get a defense or redirect the point where the infestation occurs and people will like to use more drills, also there is some mods than allows to synthesize plasteel, so maybe is some of the reasons people just avoid installing this mod because they do not like to use drills in first place.

@Etherdreamer Are you using deep drills as the main way to get plasteel and gold in the late-game phase? I am, and IMHO, this is the easiest way. Steady input and low risk.

Since I rely so much on deep drilling, I'd been waiting for someone to make this mod since my 1000th hour into Rimworld... 1000 hours later and still no one bother to make this. Compare to other mods out there, this is like child play. I am sure even non modder can say this.

The ratio of subscribe / visit of this mod is something like 1 subscriber out of 10 visitors. Much lower than my other mod (which I was hoping for someone else to make for 2000 hours, lol). That means nobody cares about deep drilling? People don't care about underground pawn venture outside to operate deep drills? Low skilled pawns spending their lives mining gold only to waste the yields? So many reasons... Yet no one seems to care.

My question really is this: Is there a better way than deep drilling to get materials late-game?

@Gaming_Bigfoot yes, you can with an "@" it should send any notification (cause I normally do get them when someone "@" me.
@wowhvb thanks for this mod, I was normally pissed when anyone would go to drill than I was using an enclosed room with a Lock doors mod, but still, it was pretty annoying doing this setup for me.

Changed mod tag name to WarBuggy to avoid confusion. Thanks everyone for the feedback!

To my knowledge, there is no real way to tag people in Steam's Comments / Discussions sections.
Though people are free to correct me on that if that's wrong.
I personally just sub to threads if I expect any reply.

Yeah, WorkTab is great. I can't play properly without it. But it can't do everything.
Thanks for trying it ou, even with the weird name :))
Btw, could you guys tell me if there is a way to tag a user in these comment? The @ tag doesn't work, does it?

Ah, so using the billing system was your way of limiting specific pawns to operating drills, then? I know that mods like Work Tab can let you fine-tune drill operators to an extent, but this has the convenient "just have minimum skill of" option rather than needing to micro-manage the work tab settings on a per-pawn basis.
Not to mention if you find a particularly good ore and you only want your absolute best to mine it while others remain accessible to your miners, the Work Tab method won't help overmuch there, while yours shines.

Also that name threw me for a slight loop, then I read the other comments lol

Ah, I see! Haha! Then, perhaps it would have been better with a possessive form, such as "Buggy's Billed Deep Drill"? (The name does have a nice ring to it, now that I think on it.)

@Thundercraft That is just my tag name. Since there might be another mod with the same name, modders are advised to "tag" their mods. "Buggy" is my most favorite nickname.
As you pointed out, it is indeed misleading :)) Oh well, I hope people will give it a go anyway. Let's see!

Q: Why is the word "Buggy" in the title? Does it contain a software "bug" or glitch that makes it behave weird? Or is the name due to allowing the infestation mechanism or some other reason?