Category:Ores

Ores are mined from Asteroids or Planets, and are processed into ingots in one of the Refineries. Grids are made of blocks, blocks are made of components, components are made of materials, materials are made of ores. You mine ores from voxels using either a ship-mounted drill or Hand Drill. Ores can also be looted from the cargo holds of some pre-built ships, especially mining ships.

Chunks of all of the ores currently in game

How to detect ores

Use a  Hand Drill or  Ore Detector to see ores close-by displayed on your HUD.

• Hand drills only scan the topmost layers and miss most deposits.
• Fly low in a small-grid ship with a small-grid Ore Detector to detect medium deep deposits.
• Fly low in a large-grid ship with a large-grid Ore Detector to detect all deposits.

Remember to set the Ore Detectors to maximum range!

Ore patches on planets are generally visible from jetpacking height as groups of discolored spots on the ground.

• Ore patches are best visible on plains, under ice and sand.
• Ore patches are least visible on mountains or under snow or grass.
• In space, use a camera and zoom in on asteroids.

If you don't find ores in one asteroid cluster, or in one planet region, travel a bit further: There are areas with nothing, the deposits have a fixed distribution.

How to plan a planetary mine

Planetary ore deposits appear in groups of two or three, and are spread out in horizontal layers below each other.

Mining horizontal ore layers with an atmospheric miner ship

If you only detect the top deposit (or on asteroids, the outermost deposit), dig down to the first deposit and scan again 50 m or 150 m below.

• Cobalt is often together with Iron and Nickel
• Magnesium is often together with Nickel and Silicon
• Gold is often together with Iron and Silver

Vertical ore distribution

Certain ores are found more often in certain depth ranges:

Horizontal ore distribution

Technically, ores are evenly distributed across the planets, but apart from the top deposit, they are out of range of the handdrill, so you easily miss them. Screenshots of ore patches in different environments:

• 

  Dark ore patch

• 

  Light ore patch

• 

  Horizontal ore distribution seen from above

How to mine ores

The handheld drill as well as the drill block both support two different dig modes, using - and - click.

1. On foot, when drilling near your feet, first toggle C key to crouch to reach down.
2. Equip the drill and hold to dig tunnels through the grass and dirt layers to get closer to rock and ore deposits.
   Careful, this mode destroys ores, ice, and stone!
3. Equip the drill and hold to mine ores. Ores, ice, and stone drop as items.
4. On foot, hold F key and aim at dropped ore chunks to pick them up into your inventory.

Should I pick up stone or not?

• If you only have a  Survival Kit, prefer  Stone.
• If you have a  Basic Assembler and you're tight on basic resources, process stone and ores.
• If you have a  Basic Assembler and have found ore deposits, use  Ejectors to auto-discard stone from cargo containers.

You can ignite  Warheads as mining charges to destroy the top sand and stone layers fast. But calculate carefully, warheads destroy ores and ice as well.

Which facility processes which ore

To refine stone or ores into ingots, you need a  Basic Refinery, a  Refinery, or a  Survival Kit.

Note:  Ice is mined just like ore, but processed exclusively in an  O2 H2 Generator, so see there.

To process stone in the Survival Kit, you must manually queue the production of ingots from stone. In contrast, Refineries automatically pull stone and ores from all connected cargo containers to process them.

The yield of a  Basic Refinery is 30% lower than that of a  Refinery or  Survival Kit. Because of this, it is not recommended to use a Basic Refinery for stone processing in the early game stages, as a Survival kit produces more Ingots per kilo of stone.

Raw material	Refinery	Basic Refinery	Survival Kit	Refined material
Stone	1.40%	0.98%	1.40%	Gravel
	3.00%	2.10%	3.00%	Iron ingots
	0.24%	0.168%	0.24%	Nickel ingots
	0.40%	0.28%	0.40%	Silicon wafers
Scrap Metal	80.00%	56.00%	-	Iron ingots
Iron	70.00%	49.00%	-	Iron ingots
Nickel	40.00%	28.00%	-	Nickel ingots
Silicon	70.00%	49.00%	-	Silicon wafers
Cobalt	30.00%	21.00%	-	Cobalt ingots
Magnesium	0.70%	0.49%	-	Magnesium powder
Silver	10.00%	-	-	Silver ingots
Gold	1.00%	-	-	Gold ingots
Uranium	1.00%	-	-	Uranium ingots
Platinum	0.50%	-	-	Platinum ingots

Examples:

• If you refine 1000 kg of Silicon ore in a Basic Refinery, you will get 49% of the weight in Silicon, which is 490 kg.
• If you refine 1000 kg of Silicon ore in a Refinery, you will get 70% of the weight in Silicon, which is 700 kg.
• If you refine 1000 kg of Silicon ore in a Refinery with 4 Yield Modules, you will get 140% of the weight in Silicon, which is 1400 kg.

Sources

Example picture of the fixed distribution of ore deposits from Simon5's "How to create your own planet - the guide (archived)".