Mega Mining

⛏️ Mega Mining

Giant electric bucket-wheel excavators: mark an area with the mining tool, build one next to it, and watch the wheel eat the hill and send everything straight onto your conveyors.

No excavators, no trucks: a bucket-wheel excavator is a building that digs everything marked with the vanilla mining tool around it, at up to 90 per second. Its superstructure slews, the telescopic boom pitches and extends, and the wheel cuts the face top-down in benches. When everything in reach is dug, it drives out on its own track and builds more track as it goes.

⛏️ Digs like the real thing

• 🎡 Real boom geometry: further out it reaches higher and deeper, close in only near its own level
• 🪜 Benches, no craters: top-down, layer by layer, and the wheel keeps cutting while the boom sweeps along the face
• ⛰️ Never through the hill: it only digs where the boom clears the ground all the way to the wheel
• 🌲 Clears trees, stumps and boulders in its way (a boulder's stone comes out with the rest)
• 📏 Digging depth set in its window; never below what you marked, never under buildings
• 🪨 Watch the ore travel: chunks of what it digs ride along the boom belt, through the machine and back along its track

🛤️ Drives on its own track

• 🚂 The crawler machine drives out of its station on 8-tile track segments, forward and back, like the vanilla stacker tower
• 🏗️ At the end of its track it builds the next segment itself (your construction trucks bring the materials)
• 🔢 Set how many segments it may build, or unlimited (up to 250)
• ↩️ Backs up along its whole track for ground left too close to the wheel
• ⛰️ The track follows its pit down: each new segment sits at the level of the ground there
• 📝 It builds its own track even while planning mode is on

🎯 Eight outputs, your choice

• 📦 8 outputs, A to H, straight onto conveyors
• 🧭 Sorts itself: when built, it gives each product in reach its own output (A to G), and H takes everything else; Assign by what is around does it again
• 🖱️ Pick the products of each output with icons, like on the vanilla ore sorting plant
• ♾️ An output with nothing chosen takes everything else; a product chosen on several outputs is spread over them
• 🏷️ Product icons above the outputs show what comes out

🏗️ Three levels

• Bucket-wheel excavator: 15/s, 39 m boom, reach 8-20 tiles at its level, digs 8 tiles deep, 1.5 MW
• Large bucket-wheel excavator: 40/s, 57 m boom, reach 11-30 tiles, 12 tiles deep, 3 MW
• Giant bucket-wheel excavator: 90/s, 83 m boom, reach 15-43 tiles, 16 tiles deep, 6 MW
• ⬆️ Upgrades in place on the same 12 × 12 footprint

📊 Always knows why

• 🟢 The top of its window says what it is doing or why it stopped: nothing to dig, blocked by higher ground, outputs full, no output for a product, no power, workers or maintenance
• 🔍 When it stops, it says what marked ground is left near it and why it cannot dig it: too close for the boom, too high, too deep, behind higher ground
• 🔔 Problems that last get a warning in the notification list
• 📈 Productivity and charts like other buildings; dug material counts in the statistics
• ⚡ Needs electricity, workers and maintenance like a factory machine

How to start

1. Research Bucket-wheel excavators (after Stacker).
2. Mark an area with the vanilla mining tool (no mine tower needed).
3. Build a bucket-wheel excavator (Terraforming toolbar) next to it, on flat ground. Its track leaves the station's west side.
4. Connect conveyors to its outputs. A giant one digs up to 90 per second: give the main products two or three outputs, or use fast belts.

Good to know

• Can be added to existing saves, but not removed once you have built excavators.
• Level II needs Vehicle assembly III, level III Vehicle assembly III (hydrogen).
• Setting in Options → Mods → Mega Mining: dig speed (25-400 %).
• Made for Captain of Industry 0.8.7.

All models and icons are original. No game files included.