Subscribe to download
Mobile Refinery

The mobile refinery is a nice compact design which contains 16 Refineries which are automatically fed by conveyors from the gravity assisted collector located at the front of the ship. It also contains a hanger bay on each side to dock your mining ships when you are ready to change locations.

In addition each hanger bay is equipped with a medical bay and assembler. The assemblers are connected directly to the refineries to allow for easy access of materials needed to construct or repair ships in the hanger.

For a quick breakdown the ship contains the following:
16x Refineries
3x Assemblers
2x Small Containers
2x Medical Bays
4x Small Reactors
1x Collector


The ship was originally built in Survival which is the main reason for the sleek design. It has also gone through several stages as patches added new block types. I have decided to include some of the older versions so you can see how it progressed. I left out ones where the change was either too minor or didn’t work anymore, like when I had to move the engines from the core so they didn’t blast into the hanger bay.

The first one was simply the center core with the refineries inside. This was the first large ship I built in survival. It was before the addition of collectors so the scoop pulls the ore into the ship where it gathers for collection and manual placed into the Refineries. This layout only allowed for 8 Refineries though.

The second iteration was after I had finished the core and had resources processing away, I wanted it to look more like a real mobile base ship so I worked on adding the hangers and the bridge. It was at this point that I was fairly satisfied with the Design of the Mobile Refinery and considered it done.

The current iteration came with the addition of conveyors and glass. I redid the bridge with glass windows to make it look much nicer and I added a conveyer system while completely redoing the core. Things go even faster now that the collector automatically moves ore from the scoop into the refineries. I also added Large Landing Pads in each bay to better hold the docked ships. After one of the patches the ships seem to disconnect more frequently with just the small landing pads on. The gravity field from the scoop on all the iterations extends a bit from the ship allowing you to park it over the asteroid you are mining and have the extra ore fall down into it.

I have also include some rather straight forward mining ship designs that I also made in the same survival game I built the Mobile Refinery in, so they should be easy to construct in your own game. I have included the most current version of each which includes the conveyors and connectors it allow for easy unloading into the Mobile Refinery.

Each of the designs is also capable of drilling straight through an asteroid. But only two of them can actually dock with the Mobile Refinery. The Miner 2 ship I tend to attach to the back of the Mobile Refinery when moving to a new location.

Anyhow let me know what you think, along with any suggestions for improving the design.


UPDATE: I have added a Mk III Version of the ship.

I figured some might find the lack of extra cargo space to be a bit prohibitive so I did some reworking on the inside of the ship and was able to fit in an additional 50 Small Cargo Containers. If you are building the ship in survival you can of course add them as need be.

I also figure that unlike me some may only want to use the ship solely for mining/refining and have a base elsewhere. As such they need a way to unload all that precious refined ore. So I have added 6 connectors to the rear of the ship for off loading. Thanks to these additions it can now also double as a Huge Cargo ship for transporting goods.