Mixed Mining

This is an advanced multi-ore mining block for Brian's Self-Building Mega-Factory (SBF). This design starts from that book's Mine blueprint, copying its multi-ore LTN provider station.

Mixed Mining provides all mined ores continuously. There are blueprints for mining with and without fluids. Mined uranium ore is routed to a dedicated 4-wagon provider station.

Structure

The mine is composed of thousands of electric mining drills working in groups of 4. This splits the block into hundreds of small patches which allows the block to control which ores get mined.

Each drill group shares a short primary belt (yellow) which empties into a secondary belt (blue) through a splitter. In the Wet Mining block, this junction is rate-limited when the blue belts are full so that each drill group is able to contribute. This helps prevent uranium shortages when that ore is farthest upstream from the station, at the cost of UPS.

There are 15 secondary belts (blue) bringing ores downstream to the station. In the wet/dry blueprint, splitters at the end of the secondary belts push uranium onto dedicated belts which terminate at the 4-wagon station. The remaining ore is loaded into the 8-wagon station at a rate of up to 8 blue belts.

The dry mining block's secondary belts run in pairs that are combined into single belts at the end. In case any of the 8x8 balancer inputs are running dry, you can re-route the second half of any backed-up belt pairs into those empty inputs to improve throughput.

Wet Mining

Uranium mining is enabled by a network of pipes and a station requesting sulfuric acid. The drills are never used as pipes. Each drill is served directly by a pipe. There is no need to manually fix up the block after construction.

The fluid network can hold over 500k fluid (40 wagon loads!) even before considering what the drills can hold. So it's going to request a lot of acid. But don't worry! It won't go to waste. The wet drills can suck those pipes dry.

Control Logic

Back on the primary belts (yellow), just before the splitter, there is a wire reading the yellow belt's contents and enabling the belt when everything <= 10. Since the belt is stopped whenever anything > 10, we can stop a coal-producing group of drills by putting coal:10 on the wire. When coal on belt AND coal:10 on wire, the belt is disabled and the coal sits there--along with any other ores that happen to be produced in that small patch--until coal:10 goes away.

Wet Mining has an additional set of signals that can stop a primary belt. This is used to even out the contribution of ores from different groups, preventing the closest groups from doing the majority of the mining and allowing the more distant ores to reach the station. The signals 1-6 are used for this. They are emitted by the race track in the middle of the station. They use the same logic as above: when any signal's value exceeds 10, the yellow belt is disabled.