That would be an amazing quality of life change, I'd definitely vote for it if there were a feature request on the Keen forum ;)

Thanks for the reply! So far I have found that the ships being same name doesn't seem to affect PAM scripts. The problem arises when trying to use one of those ships manually.

I was using a bunch of other miners (DerMakrat's ships) and I kept wondering why a bunch of them would fall off the docking ports at the same time, it was due to them being in recharge and when I'd undock it'd undock all the other ships of same name.

Too bad there's no "Name your ship" window that pops up when selecting a blueprint that could generate group names and name parts based off that string.

Hi Khadgarion, yes that was an issue I had as well, unfortunately last time I asked Isy (admittedly a few years ago now), group names are not something scripts can change.

That was one of the reasons I have the PB's turned off in the blueprints, so that the script don't potentially trigger things in the wrong groups

Spite, I love your ships. How do you deal with having multiples of the same ship when it comes to block / grid names? I've been using Isy's Renamer, but group names are not changeable as far as I can tell so each time I make a new ship I have to re-create all the groups and setup the hotbar with the new group names.

Hmmm, the only time this has happened to me is while playing on a dedicated server. When the server restarted with PAM in the middle of a job, it would bug and get stuck in some weird orientations.

If you're not playing on a dedicated server, some things you could try are:

- decrease the forward and back work speed → this creates a slightly wider tunnel
- increase the Width / Height overlap → less chance of leaving a small piece of voxel terrain floating somewhere that the ship can get caught on.
- Make sure that the position you’re starting the job from is directly above and well clear of the terrain you’re going to be mining → if it is too low then there is a possibility that the miner clips the edge of the hole its drilling on the way back to drop off its load, and can tip over

Hope at least some of that was helpful!

Any thoughts on as to how I came upon my miner tipped over like a cow next to the quarry hole? Can't seem to get her up and she has 30% batt. I can make another, but I'd like to avoid having to do this in the future (I'm absolutely positive it is something I did incorrectly)

I like it! definitely naming a miner after a cricket at some point now :D

Oh! Possible design idea / use case, based on a quirk of PAM logic: A tunnel miner that's just designed to bore out rock, without ever trying to drop it off. PAM will keep digging until it hits the battery/fuel threshold if it can't fill the cargo to the set limit. I made a little "mole cricket" drone that had a medium cargo container that wasn't actually hooked up (because I derp and didn't weld the conveyor.) The drone just kept digging, destroying all the stone and returning to recharge when the battery got low.

It ended up being really useful for clearing out big chambers for my base without the minor hassle of dumping the stone or disposing of a couple kilotons of gravel crates. ( ^-^ )

The additional thrusters seems to have helped, at least in the RoverShred moutains on Earthlike. I was able to push the cargo limit back up to 80% without it getting stuck. (So effectively double the cargo capacity it had before.)

It's likely that it could go a little higher, but with really small ships PAM gets weird about calculating the cargo. It seems to include things like the rover seat, even though it's impossible to use because "no conveyor ports." 80% seems like a "safe" amount though, and it will make collecting enough materials to jump to one of the really big quarry miners much faster. ( ^-^ )

Yeah I remember I had a slower mining speed set ages ago, then on a later PAM update I forgot to change it, so I'll add that to the list!

As for the drills off when reversing, I think that is a very cunning solution for the smaller miners, and will also include that setting change, so thank you!

Testing now. It seems to have helped with the overloading. Oh, additional detail that might be important for testing: in the PAM settings, I switch it to move 0.5 m/s when mining, and to only run the drills when moving forward. (Drills off when it backs out.) I discovered that the drills pick up tiny amounts of ore when backing up, and on the small ships that's enough to overload the miner. Again, it seems to be less of an issue with the larger models. The slower movement speed gives it time to "dissolve" more of the voxels, reducing the chance of getting stuck or damaged, or just hung up on a random spike of voxel material.

Ok, well let me know if an extra 3 thrusters is enough, if not I'll make some more changes or potentially do more testing.

Maybe I also need to do some hybrid thrust quarry miners.

Inventory setting shouldn't really matter, as the multiplier affects the weight as well, but I also do all testing/playing on realistic settings.

Just on Earthlike, in the RoverShred mountains. My lander came down just below the snow line, so the air is probably a bit thin. That said, even in the valley I had to turn the cargo capacity down to 60%. I'm also playing at "realistic" settings for everything except Engineer Inventory (which is at x3.)

I think with this series of miners specifically it's partly just an unfortunate combo of game mechanics and slight oddities in how PAM runs. At 40% cargo it works *most* of the time. Except that once in a while it seems to gulp an extra few thousand stone or ore and suddenly it's way too heavy. And by the time PAM shuts off the drills the extra weight drops it and fills the inventory entirely.

It doesn't happen with the bigger miners, because it takes more than a fraction of a second to fill 10% of their cargo.

Hi EmberStar, sorry about that!

For now I did a quick update, adding an extra three thrusters and a few cosmetic changes. It seems I'll have to go through the miners and check they still have enough lift.

Also, what planet are you on? all of the current ISL mining ships were released before Pertam, so they won't work right there. I will do another miner series for high gravity, low atmoshpere planets.

I started a new game, and wanted to use this to jump from "hand drill and pockets" to one of the larger mining robots you've made. This design really seems to need more lifting thrust. ( OnO ) I've played with the PAM settings and turned the cargo threshold down to 40%, and it *still* consistently overloads the drills, gets stuck in the hold and then sits there until the batteries run out. Anything above the mountain snowline is apparently out of reach with any cargo capacity setting at all. (Which is, unfortunately, where I landed at the game start and where all the local ore seems to be.)

I will try the suggestion from below and rip off the merge block to install some more thrusters there. But I'm afraid Gimpy is probably going to have an industrial accident as soon as I can build one of the larger quarry miners. ( O.O )

The MK 2 version is out now, with 6 drills and cargo containers!

3. For a miner with more cargo space try out either of the tunnel miner series in the collection (although only the MK 2 has stone ejectors), at some point I will most likely do a larger version of the quarry miner (the fact that I could only do atmospheric and ion variants for this version bugs me, and I'd like to fit stone ejectors somewhere on the MK 2), however at the moment I'm trying to put together some large grid ships for the ISL fleet, so it could be a while.

However, since its automated and pretty much set and forget, the lack of cargo space shouldn't be too much of an issue for now, as it simply means a little bit more back and forth for the drone, with no work on the player's side after initial set up (hopefully).


Glad you like the ships so far though! And if you come up with any ships you think are cool I'd love to see them!

2/2

Hi there Whirling Manatee

1. I have done quite a bit of testing with it, it should have enough lift to do the job, while being as cheap as possible. Is it crashing or failing to lift? or just sluggish? If its not able to fly properly then I can update the blueprint to include a few more lifting thrusters (I had to do a similar thing with the MK 1 tunnel miner). Alternatively you could lower the fill percentage PAM uses before it returns to drop off cargo.

2. Yup, its supposed to be the simplest, cheapest miner I could functionally put together for earth/moon starts, unfortunately I can't do much about PAM's drill balancing without adding sorters to the build and therefore adding a bunch of unnecessary PCU.

1/2

I love the idea behind this workshop and many of the designs, but had a few problems with this blueprint.

1. Seems to lack upward thrust with the default PAM settings. Slow acceleration on earth when the drills are full of ice, which makes PAM very slow in between nodes with altitude change. I replaced the merge block on the back with 3 thrusters and it's MUCH faster. Not sure where to place these in a cleaner build, but I think this bp would be better with at least a couple more.
2. Drill balancing from PAM seems to have a hard time. Maybe because there's no storage? The last drill takes forever to fill. My solution was to reduce PAM's max load parameter, to have it just bail on the job earlier, but I wonder if there's another solution.
3.Capacity is just kind of low. I'd love to see a slightly heavier-duty version of this build that sports a couple of cargo containers.

Thanks for making all these! Definitely inspires me to trying to come up with some similar designs of my own.

It should work fine without the script if that's what you mean? (you will have to control it manually though)

Otherwise you'll have to talk to Keks, he is the one who wrote the script, I just designed this ship.

You could ask him on the workshop page for his script, it should be linked on the right under "required items".

Is there any chance to get it working on public servers that forbid cpu-intensive scripts?

Yeah, at least so far only the toolbars are an issue, the "keep blueprint" option usually works for the rest (unless it bugs out, again)

Thanks, will check when I'm next on... got another 6 of these bad boys to print in my world :)

It would be nice if Keen would add some sort of projector memory so that you could setup a blueprint and the projector would remember all of its settings for that blueprint so you didn't have to set it up again each time.

Ok, Orientation fixed!

thanks, and I'll go have a look now, but the projectors have been doing some weird stuff lately.

Also sometimes the toolbars will be there, sometimes they won't (when printing from a projector), unfortunately I don't know of a proper solution, but if you find one please let me know!

I love these little worker bees. Some feedback for you below :)

When projecting to build in survival this initially projects upside down. Also, after building in survival toolbars 2 and 3 seem to be empty.