Exploit: Digging and sorting without trucks

It's possible to excavate quickly without ore sorter or trucks by constantly unassigning/re-assigning excavators to the mining tower.

The excavators' buckets are emptied when the excavator is unassigned from the tower (or asked to drive manually somewhere). The emptying happens without any unity cost and the material is teleported to the nearest available storage (or the shipyard). Though tedious, it's the optimal way to dig, considering no ore sorting plants or trucks are needed, at all. It could be considered a cheat when considering achievements.

I can see a few ways to fix this, for example by never emptying the buckets, or, if emptying is necessary, give an alert and force the player to empty the bucket using Unity (currently not necessary or possible for excavators).

i think it is QoL for players and should be unchanged by default
and for racing (speedrunning, etc) / leaderboard there should be smth like iron mode where all of this nuances, that you mention, are implemented

Another way is to simply destroy the materials. That’ll still be QoL but remove the exploit.

…or drop them on the ground the excavator is standing. There are options.

I'm fine as is. Also fine with do not empty, empty for unity, dump on ground.
I rarely use it early start, I find it too tedious. I rather cheat at the ore sorter 😬

Your honesty is refreshing 😄

There is 3rd, similar "exploit" very early. Build no ore sorter (esp. on admiral you will have better use for the CP1). Assign one, for comfort two, trucks to your first excvator(s). You check for their error messages, pause, unity empty them, unpause. It's usually easy to have enough unity surplus for this. While it needs trucks and costs unity, it's not even 1/3 of manual click effort compared to directly manipulating the excavator.
IMO, all unity actions should cost more every time used, and have a cool down, like the insta trades.

I consider that a borderline exploit, since it’s using a consciously designed feature that is just arguably too cheap.

Unassigning/re-assigning up to 10 excavators can be done in 2 clicks by holding Ctrl and clicking - then + in the Mining tower window.

That's why I wrote "exploit".
I do not think you (or any other human) will play this exploit to the point of having 10 excavators per tower. You are right, it's less clicks than I thought, though. But having to manually intervene with every dig will slow down the excavators and reduce their throughput. My approach avoids much of that (esp. with >=2 trucks).
Did you try your exploit for e.g. the first 10 years? At least I'd want a mod, that automatically pauses the game, whenever the related error pops up. I'm not disciplined enough to pause after every single game day (and even that wastes excavator throughput).
We do not need to AI proof the game, yet. I guess.

I used it to avoid shortages in the first 5 years, mostly with 1-3 excavators. It’s tedious, especially with multiple mining sites to manage.

I would like it fixed, because I’ll be tempted to use it as long as it exists, and it’s more fun and incentivizing for me to plan optimal strategies and configurations when I know I won’t be able to cover up my mistakes by using an exploit.