You know how collapsing terrain is quick and gives more resources than normal mining, but you don’t do it much due to the risk that comes with it? There’s a little trick that I found today while trying to find a way to mine bigger structures more safely.

1.Of course, before you have the final block you need to break, you must mine the rest out first. When you are mining in areas with lots of collectables, your drones can take damage much higher the further they go. When your drones begin to start taking considerable damage, collect the collectables and later finish the mining. Avoiding heal times is extremely important for saving time. This step can be used whether you are collapsing or not.
2.Be sure the last block remaining is at the edge of the structure.
3.Be sure task masks are set to none for all but one drone and tell the other drones to retreat.
4.Move the drone to the outside of the terrain being collapsed and next to the final block.
5.Mine the block with that one utility drone.
(6.) Of course, collectables after the collapse can also do damage. For the best results, only task the closest ones to your utility drones so they won’t go all the way in the pile and screw themselves up.

These steps alone will help reduce damage, however this is a kind of obvious tip, but there is also a step that could go between 4 and 5 to reduce damage even more.

4.5 Before mining the block, place a defender drone on top of the utility drone.



Then step 5...



There are ~5-7 layers on top of that one block, and after collapsing it my utility drone only took ~20-30 damage and the defender drone didn’t take much either…

https://forum.recogthegame.com/topic/39/collapsing-terrain-safely - If this guide gets any updates, they'll probably be on this forum post.