Quarry Controller

A BuildCraft-style automated miner: mark out an area with landmarks and the controller builds a glowing frame and excavates the interior, layer by layer, down to bedrock.

Overview#

The Quarry Controller is the brain of the miner. You mark a rectangular area with Quarry Landmarks, place the controller beside it, give it frame material and power, and it:

1. Builds a frame — a glowing, see-through structural ring around the claimed rectangle.

2. Mines the rectangle's interior (the columns under the frame ring are left intact) **layer

   by layer**, top to bedrock, like a 3D printer in reverse — a drill head travels the gantry to each block, one block at a time.

3. Buffers and auto-ejects what it digs: mined items into an internal inventory, and any liquids

   it hits into an internal fluid tank — both push out to adjacent storage / pipes (including other mods' — see Universal Pipe). Liquid it has nowhere to put is destroyed rather than allowed to hold the dig up.

It never destroys an item it can't store: if the output buffer fills or the power runs out, it pauses (the GUI tells you why) and resumes on its own once you fix it. Liquids are the deliberate exception — see below.

Obtaining#

Craft (shaped):

I D I
F R F
I I I

I = Nerosteel Ingot · D = Diamond · F = Frame Casing · R = Block of Redstone

Tier 1 is the craftable version today. Tier 2 / Tier 3 controllers (bigger areas, more module slots, harsh-planet access) are planned — see Tiers & planets.

Setting it up#

1. Place 3 Quarry Landmarks in an L at the same Y level to define the

   corners of the rectangle. The longest side must fit the tier's cap (Tier 1 = 16×16).

2. Place the controller next to / in line with a landmark — it scans along the axes to find the

   cluster, then consumes the landmarks and starts.

No landmarks? Outline it yourself. Frame Casing is placeable: build a closed rectangle of frame blocks (same Y level, complete perimeter, same size limits) and place the controller beside the ring — it adopts the outline as its mining area and starts mining right away, skipping the frame-building step.

3. Put Frame Casing in the frame slot (top-left of the GUI). The frame costs

   one casing per perimeter cell (the controller's own cell and any block entities on the perimeter are skipped, leaving a gap rather than overwriting them).

4. Pipe power in (see below). Building the frame is free, but mining needs energy.

How it works#

• Power: an internal 200,000 FE buffer, filled through the energy capability on any side —

  connect a Universal Pipe from a Combustion/Passive Generator or a Battery. Dig speed scales with the power you supply, up to the tier's per-cycle ceiling × your modules' speed bonus × the planet's speed factor. Base cost is 40 FE per block (lowered by Efficiency modules). The dig is paced (a work cycle every few ticks) so even with unlimited power it mines at a steady rate, not instantly.

• Output buffer: 12 internal slots for mined items; auto-ejects into an adjacent inventory /

  pipe. Mining pauses ("buffer full") when it can't fit a drop — nothing is ever voided.

• Fluid buffer: source liquids (water, lava) in the dig area are sucked up into a

  16,000 mB internal tank that auto-ejects to an adjacent Fluid Tank / pipe — another mod's tank or pipe counts too (see Universal Pipe). The tank holds one fluid at a time and 16 source blocks' worth of it, and the quarry never waits for it: anything that won't fit — the overflow, and any fluid that isn't the one it is already holding — is destroyed as it digs, so a dig through an ocean or a lava lake carries on regardless. It clears at most 64 source blocks per mining tick, so a big body of water drains steadily over a few seconds instead of vanishing all at once. Want none of it kept? Slot an Evaporator Module — with one installed the quarry destroys every liquid on sight and the buffer stays empty.

• Obstacles: it skips bedrock and other unbreakable blocks, and skips the entire column

  under a tile-entity (chests, spawners, machines) so they're left intact. It also skips other quarries' frames.

• Interior only: it excavates the inside of the rectangle and never digs the columns under

  the frame ring, so the frame keeps its footing and the pit walls stay clean.

• Drill head + gantry: while it runs, a solid 3-D gantry rides the frame — a bridge beam with

  end trucks, a carriage that tracks the dig column, and a support shaft — and a spinning 3-D drill bit (chuck, flutes, and a glowing tapered tip) descends point-down to the exact block being mined.

• The frame is a real 3-D structure — glowing corner posts and edge rails with an open,

  see-through centre (so you can watch the dig through it).

• Far edges: a large area is force-loaded one chunk at a time while actively mining, so the

  dig keeps going as you range its edges; each chunk is released as soon as the dig moves past it (and any remainder when it finishes or is removed), so the quarry never pins the whole region — keeping memory use and world-save time low.

• Frame damage: if a frame block is broken mid-dig (it drops a Frame Casing), the quarry

  rebuilds the gap from its casing stock — or pauses ("frame incomplete") until you patch the ring by hand or insert casings into the frame slots.

• Reclaiming: when the dig finishes, the frame is dismantled and the standing casings are

  returned to the controller's frame slots. Breaking the controller mid-dig instead orphans the frame: the frame blocks slowly crumble away one by one over the next few minutes (each block at its own random moment, roughly 30 s – 4 min by default — tune with quarryFrameDecayTicks), and each drops its Frame Casing as it goes, the same drop as mining it yourself. Placing a new controller beside a still-standing ring re-adopts it and stops the decay.

GUI status lines#

Tiers & planets#

The miner runs anywhere it has power, but the harsh outer moons are gated by tier:

Mining speed/yield also varies per planet (the dense outer moons mine a little slower). A too-low tier on a gated planet pauses with "wrong planet".

Upgrades & the future#

• Upgrade Modules (Speed / Efficiency / Fortune / Silk Touch / Evaporator) slot into the

  controller and tune its behaviour. They're a cross-machine system — the same cards will work in other machines.

• Filters (whitelist-keep, void the rest — e.g. trash cobble) are a planned follow-up; the

  output pipeline is already built to drop them in.

Details#

• ID: nerospace:quarry_controller · Tool: pickaxe, iron tier · Drops: itself (plus its buffered items, casings and modules)

• Companion blocks: Quarry Landmark, Quarry Frame (placed by the machine or by

  hand from a Frame Casing; always drops a Frame Casing — whether a player breaks it or it decays away after its controller is destroyed)

• Capabilities: energy in (any side); mined items out (any side); fluid out (any side).

  The frame-casing and module slots are configuration-only — they can't be piped in or out, so automation can never pull your modules or casings (load casings by hand in the GUI)

• Config: scales with the standard energyRateMultiplier, fuelCostMultiplier, and

  machineSpeedMultiplier; quarryFrameDecayTicks tunes how slowly an orphaned frame crumbles (see Configuration)