Mining

Mining is how you collect resources and clear the landscape. It ranges from tapping a single ore by hand to running fields of automated drills. This page covers all four approaches.

Manual mining

Hold X to mine whatever your cursor is on — ores, trees, rocks, or placed buildings. Your character mines one entity at a time at close range. This is how you start the game and how you remove individual structures throughout it.

Mining a building picks it up and returns it to your inventory rather than destroying it. This takes time, and larger buildings take longer. Factorio Access plays a continuous clicking sound while a building is being mined manually, which stops when it is picked up.

Area obstacle clearing

SHIFT + X is a Factorio Access cheat that instantly clears trees, rocks, remnants, and items on the ground within 10 tiles of you. It does not mine ores. This is a low-impact cheat intended to reduce the fiddling involved in clearing land before building, and it is enabled by default.

Large-scale removal

When clearing larger areas or remodelling your factory, you still have to do the actual mining manually at first. The planner tools help you organise what needs to go, and Kruise Kontrol can automate the legwork of running around and doing it. Later, once you unlock and set up construction robots, they take over these jobs and make the whole process much faster.

The two planner tools for removal are:

Deconstruction planner — drag it over an area to mark everything inside for deconstruction. Construction robots will then come and clear it automatically.
Cut tool — selects an area, marks it for deconstruction, and gives you a blueprint of what was there. Useful when you want to move a section of your factory rather than simply delete it.

Kruise Kontrol is helpful here. Point the cursor at a deconstruction-marked object and activate KK, and your character will run around and manually mine all marked objects in the area. This is useful before you have construction robots to do this automatically. See the Kruise Kontrol page for details.

There is also a shortcut for removing blueprint ghosts specifically: To instantly clear all ghost entities within 100 tiles, press CTRL + SHIFT + X. Blueprint ghosts and more about planning tools are covered further on the Blueprints and Planners page.

Mining drills

Mining drills automate ore collection so you don't have to stand on a patch and hold X all day. There are two types:

Burner mining drills — 2 by 2. They run on solid fuel placed inside. Slower, smaller, and dirtier, but available early before you have electricity.
Electric mining drills — 3 by 3. They run on electricity. Faster and larger, and the standard choice for any serious mining operation.

All mining drills have an output chute on one side where mined ore drops out. The direction the chute faces is set when you place the drill. Ore drops onto a belt, into a chest, or in front of an inserter if one is positioned to catch it. It can even be dropped directly into a furnace.

Some ores cannot be mined by hand at all and instead require electric mining drills with specific fluids supplied to them. In the base game, uranium ore requires sulphuric acid. Mods can introduce ores that require other fluids. An electric mining drill automatically exposes pipe interfaces on its three sides without output chutes when placed over a resource that requires using a fluid.

For setting up a full automated mining and smelting line, see the Furnaces page.

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