Does anything beat mining by hand?

Couple problems with your statements
1: miners can be configured to take lapotron crystals directly.
2: Quarry: doesn't necessarily have to be powered by combustion engines. I generally power mine with 4-5 electric engines from Forestry.

anyway, I generally use quarries myself and just feed the cobble, dirt and other stuff into recyclers. The scrap goes either to scrap boxes or a mass fab, depending on if I have one.

if you don't like the big hole you can always dig a few layers under the surface and stick the quarry there.

Think of it this way... Mining by hand allows for the MOST possible precision of harvesting blocks per volume. Sure, you might have to break a few stone here or there to fully get into an ore vein, but beyond that, you have the maximum level of control with how you spend the effort to mine materials from underground...

Alternatively, the machines used to mine blocks with enable you to leave the process to automation, at the cost of precision. While the IC Mining well is the 2nd most precise means of harvesting ore, it still means you have to go thru the logistical effort of powering it and fining the right spot to place the machine at (as well as dealing with the volume of material coming from the machine as well)...

So really it's a question of whether or not you want to spend time or energy in minecraft to obtain materials, as well as at what level of precision do you desire while doing so...

Here's my take:

-Mining by hand (around y=10) is best if you want gold, diamonds, lava, etc.

-The IC2 Miner is best if you want iron, tin, copper, coal dust, etc.

-The Buildcraft quarry is best if you want recycler fodder.

The buildcraft mining well is less effiecient than both the miner and the quarry, and having an EE Divining rod makes mining by hand *much* easier.

EDIT: Don't underestimate an OV'd miner's ability to collect metal ore (excepting gold) -- after four trips, none more than 30 blocks from my MFE, I got enough copper, tin, and iron ore to force me to make metal blocks (I have about 10 of each kind so far.)

What I typically do is start with a BuildCraft miner to drill straight down to bedrock, then I ladder all the way down. From there, collect any obvious ores, explore any encountered caves, as well as quick and easy access to the lower layers where all the good stuff is.

The best way is to wander around with a scanner until you find a good concentration below you, and set up a miner. When it's done, pull the pipe and fill the hole with dirt. then go back down in the hole and look around where it's branched off to mine. Very often, you'll find more goodies just outside the 9x9 area it's mined.

The benefit of a miner over hand mining is that the miner will never miss anything in its scan range. And it'll still work quicker than mining a 9x9 hole down to bedrock with a pick. Power supply shouldn't really be an issue. When I started using a miner, I typically powered it with an MFE, moving the miner and pump around each side of it. This will let you cover an entire chunk before needing to move the MFE.

As I'm now near/at endgame status, I have a lappack and a laser. Putting on the horizontal mode, I blast my way through 2x1 shafts with a 2 block gap in between each shaft down at layer 12. I ignore most tin and copper, and get a ton of ore quite quickly.

If you examine even a single OV diamond drill miner vs. hand mining (without a divining rod or other hax) time-usage wise, you'll find that the miner is insanely more time-efficient as well as providing close to a 100% ore yield in a given area, and that is without factoring in the fact that the miner is automated and allows you to do something else (hand mine, even) while it's going.

Consider the automation and even a normal drill OD miner has to be considered more efficient.

Consider multiple miners and mining by hand becomes a hobby at best. Totally obsolete.

So I just tried out the fortune enchantment for the first time today.

I take back my above post

I used build craft before using industrial craft. As build craft is basically limited to block sorting and gathering (pumps and quarries), I usually set up a 32x32 quarry in addition to mining by hand. Finding ore dispersion patterns typically isn't very hard once you find a vein of what you're looking for, and it passes the time when you're between build projects. If I was playing single player, there would be multiple quarries running beneath build projects, but typically I'm on a limited private server.

Anyways, with industrial craft, there is enough to do with just generating and collecting eu that managing miners is a pain in the ass. One or two 10-15 minute missions underground typically result in fantastic finds, and the typical haul includes at least 8-10 diamonds. But without a mining laser, lap pack, drill, and jetpack for quick escape, I probably would be relying on automated miners. Being in the middle of an ocean also helps- any fire caused by lava you fly through is quickly extinguished by the water you run into when you surface.

Quote from Kuudere

So I just tried out the fortune enchantment for the first time today.

I take back my above post

I don't use enchants on purpose when I have IC2. They feel overpowered, and I only use them when I'm playing MC at school to kill time, and only because I play vanilla MC at school.

I use quarries to make a hole for the huge mob traps i always build. All i gotta do afterwards is to fill it up in layers with some water flowing to the middle to collect all the mobs. Unlimited mob drops is pretty nice to have

reactor + miners allow you to perform 200-500% effective runs without any problems

Quarry. I turn the hole into a mob grinder, and feed a good amount of that gravel, dirt, and cobble to my recyclers, and the scrap to my fabs, which produce even more diamonds for me. Hard to go wrong with it.

I'm kind of noobish but I've found that the IC miner is my weapon of choice. Thanks to miners I could bring my solar farms to full fruition.

In the state that I am now, I power 4 Miners with an MFS and some Lapotron Crystals. Carrying energy is not the main problem though, the pumps eventually run out of cells so it's a matter of checking once or twice before starting the pickup. I use this technique regardless of the ore density, just put them with their effective areas adjacent and make them dig. I now have so many ores that I have made most of it into blocks (11 stacks of copper BLOCKS, and iron, and tin). I have come to realise that the most used material in IC2 is, by far, tin (making cells is expensive but worth it).

Erm. Mining turtles anyone? ;D

Quote from Snyke

Erm. Mining turtles anyone? ;D

This was a thread, 7 months old, necro'd by a spambot.

Anyways, these are the ways I typically arrange mining.

• BC-Quarry with 1-2 layers of dirt/stone above it.
• Miners (with supplement of coal mined) arranged in 9x9's.
• Write a turtle auto-mining program.
• Steve's Carts drill carts.
• Railcraft tunnel bore.
• RP2 Frame Quarry.
• Manual mining. Using Silk Touch + Efficiency (optionally with Unbreaking) picks or GT Rockcutter (optionally with Jetpack/Gravisuite/emergency Linkbook in Mystcraft Dense Ores x1-x2 ages), and finally Fortune III picks back at base with GT Industrial Grinder.

I have no idea about Thaumcraft, but I supposed back in 1.2.5 a frame Arcane Bore + Fire lens would be great too.

I think mining by drill might beat mining by hand

of course, now a frame quarry beats all.

Once you have a proper setup using a nuclear reactor for energy supply, the miner beats it all. With a 60 EU reactor, I can put down 2 miner at once and have them running at the same time, which not only clears a whole 9x18 area of all ore, but leaves nothing behind if cobble is supplied on the way back up.

The only thing that beats the IC2 miner is a fully automatic Red Power underground crawler. But setting that up is abysmal.