Astro Miner

The Astro Miner is a new vehicle added in Galacticraft 3.0.12.

Obtaining

Orion Drive

Crafting it requires the Orion Drive as a recipe component. The schematic for the Astro Miner is a possible treasure item in the Mars dimension, upon defeating the Evolved Creeper Boss, and building the Orion Drive requires samples of ore from every dimension including Asteroids.

Crafting

To build the Astro Miner you will need to have unlocked the Astro Miner Schematic which is available as a treasure item after killing the Evolved Creeper Boss on Mars, but only for players who have already unlocked the Tier 3 Rocket Schematic or who have already travelled to the Asteroids dimension in some other way.

Ingredients:

5 x Orion Drive – note, this will need 5 of many types of ore
1 x Advanced Wafer
1 x Beam Core
1 x Pole
4 x Heavy Duty Plate
2 x chest

Recipe in the NASA Workbench

Usage

The Astro Miner is an automatic mining vehicle which moves around, making tunnels and mining up everything it finds, and brings it all back to a base station where it docks. It is not player-rideable* so do not try and climb inside it!

(* OK, there are other mods which allow you to put a saddle on anything including some quite surprising things as in the movie Dr Strangelove, in which case maybe they become rideable after all.)

The Astro Miner is the ultimate automatic mining system in Minecraft!

It has certain similarities with:

a Railcraft Tunnel Bore – but it does not need rails, it’s a lot smarter and more flexible, and it returns to its base and unloads itself.
a ComputerCraft Mining Turtle – but you do not need to program it!
a Buildcraft Quarry – but it is fully mobile, and also lag-free.

Additional advantages are that it looks awesome, and it works in space: it is optimised for mining asteroids! An Astro Miner busy hunting out and mining asteroids for you in the depths of space is a pleasure to see.

Assembling the base

You will require:
- 8 Astro Miner Base blocks
- an Astro Miner
Place down the 8 Astro Miner Base blocks in a 2 x 2 x 2 cube – when correctly placed, they should transform into an industrial looking dock. At this point make sure the opening in the dock it is facing in the direction you want the Astro Miner to be mining. Facing outwards from your base is a good plan if you don’t want your precious space base to get all chewed up. You can wrench the dock to rotate it.
When you are ready, right click the Astro Miner Base with the Astro Miner item to place an Astro Miner (you cannot wrench the dock after an Astro Miner has been placed in it)
Connect power to the Astro Miner Base, let it power up for a few seconds, and enjoy!

You will be warned in chat if you cannot place the Astro Miner – for example if:

the Astro Miner Base already has an Astro Miner
there is not enough clear space to place it (because a protected or non-minable block, such as chests or wiring or machinery, is present)
the player already has the maximum allowed number of Astro Miners: there is a server-set limit on the number of Astro Miners a player can have in the game: it’s configurable, the default is 6. (This was 4 in early beta versions of the Astro Miner. Your current number can be seen using the /gcastrominer command.)

If you need to stop the Astro Miner, just hit it to break it, like hitting a rocket.

To get the blocks it has mined:

the Astro Miner Base works like a chest, you can open it and see the items in it
blocks can be extracted from the Astro Miner Base using hoppers (placed beneath it) or any type of item pipe or duct from other mods
breaking the Astro Miner Base will drop all the items it currently contains – but if you break it, the Astro Miner will not be able to dock (unless you put back another Astro Miner Base at exactly the same spot)
breaking the Astro Miner will drop any items it currently contains, but is not the best plan because then it will forget its route

The Astro Miner has special mining AI for the Asteroids dimension – it knows how to go find the asteroids and mine out only their cores. (This has been in planning for 6 months or more! All this time your Galacticraft world has been carefully saving a list of where the asteroids are, ready for this day!)

Minable blocks

The Astro Miner can mine any regular ores or blocks found in the map, including obsidian. When mining, it always mines the ore block not the drop, similar to a pickaxe with Silk Touch. It cannot currently mine liquids (or gases).

To protect from accidental damage, the Astro Miner by design will not mine certain protected blocks which are only found in player bases or underground dungeons or other ‘built’ areas of the map. Protected blocks include:

chests
any type of machinery (from any mod)
tracks
sign
farmland
growing crops
beacon
mob spawner
mossy cobblestone, stone brick or End Portal blocks.

Examples of “machinery” in the vanilla game are: piston, furnace, redstone wire, hopper, dispenser, comparator, noteblock.

When the Astro Miner encounters these protected blocks (or bedrock or lava), it returns to its base and will try mining elsewhere. If the protected blocks are in the Astro Miner’s main outward path from its base, then the player will need to fix that. If the protected blocks are in the Astro Miner’s return path back to its base, then it will stop and the player who owns the Astro Miner will be alerted in chat.

Warnings

Use at your own risk – this will destroy blocks (but only in the direction the Astro Miner Base is facing)
The Astro Miner has not been tested with other mods – it should be OK with most things though. The Astro Miner will not break any block (from any mod) which looks like machinery or chests

Tips

On servers, the Astro Miner will operate only while the player who owns it is online – if the player logs out or is kicked from the server, the Astro Miner will immediately stop and go into a dormant state, with its engines and scanning beams off. This is to prevent it from mining up the whole map for an offline player. While in the dormant state, it cannot be damaged or broken, except by a player who is in Creative Mode.
An Astro Miner will only move and operate if the chunk it is in is loaded and entities are active in that chunk. It is the same behaviour for a minecart in the vanilla game and the machines in most other mods. To be active will normally require it to be 2 chunks inside the chunk loading radius, for example if the chunk loading radius is 8 chunks (128 blocks) then the Astro Miner would need to be maximum 6 chunks (96 blocks) from the nearest player to continue operating. This may also depend on server settings, on managed servers.
If the Astro Miner finds something it cannot or will not mine, then it will turn around and go back to its base. If it is already returning to its base when obstructed, then it will stop where it is and the player will see a chat message warning of that: sometimes (every 30 seconds) it will try to start moving again, but it cannot start moving until the path is unblocked.
For this reason, the Astro Miner does not function well at very deep levels underground (below around y = 15) as it will frequently encounter bedrock and return to base
If you break the Astro Miner Base when it has an Astro Miner, the Astro Miner will eventually come back to the base location and stop there, with a message in chat about its base being destroyed. (The player had better then break the Astro Miner too.)
The Astro Miner will respect Grief Prevention / WorldGuard type plugins, so that it should be impossible for it to mine in another player’s protected land. (We have had no reports of problems in over 6 months, but if there are problems please inform the Galacticraft develops in the usual way via the Github Issues list.)

Known issues

(Do not report / bug the developers about these!)

The Astro Miner will stop if the chunk it is in is unloaded – which can happen fairly easily when it is far from its base.
The Astro Miner will not currently mine GregTech ores, due to differences between them and all other ores. It is therefore advisable not to use it in a dimension which contains GregTech ores.

This page is updated as of version 3.0.12.335 and applies to later versions of Galacticraft also.

Future plans

The scanning beam visual effects are currently a beta, these are not the final versions

Future upgrades

In a future Galacticraft version (maybe not until Galacticraft 4) there will be optional upgrades for the Astro Miner to add extra capabilities. Likely upgrades will include:

increased range
larger hold capacity
faster movement, faster mining
a chunk loader for the chunk where it is currently mining (disableable in config)
mine also any valuable blocks visible on the sides of its tunnels
immunity to lava (currently it can pass through flowing lava but not lava source blocks)
fluid collection tanks
option to ignore (or not pick up) certain blocks while mining
possibly, gas mining for gas planets
possibly, a defence mechanism like an electric shock for any mob which comes too close