I'm new to IC², but already totally loving it. Specially loving how neat and cool is to mine with technology instead of a rough, primitive pickaxe. The drill and the mining laser are, for sure, powerful tools, but is the miner the apple of my eyes. How amazing is to go to a pleasant underground tunnel, set it up with his power net and a pump and go fishing anywhere while it does it's job! When you come back, boom! Resources. Minecraft is about, well, mining and crafting. The miner is the industrial revolution of the crafting to mine. And it should be a bit more powerful (and a bit more expensive, too).
My suggestions are:
- the miner could be able to dig not only downwards, but in all directions based in the position you place it, just like a batbox, for example, that faces you on placement, but exactly the opposite: the miner will dig towards the direction you are facing when placing it (north, south, east, west, up or down);
- the miner could have an upgrade to make it dig a larger area. Something costly, for sure, but rewarding. Let's say, you put a miner in the crafting grid with a couple advanced circuits, a couple advanced machines and four advanced alloys and boom! A miner that works only with diamonds drill and ov scanner, consumes way more EU to work, but has a range of 16x16. Too OP? Well, 12X12, then. Also, should not accept less then 128 EU/t. High end industrial drilling machine needs high end powering net, no? Maybe it could also need water cells to cool down its drill (or else it would break);
- together with a pump, the miner could function as a mega powerful ultra pump of doom by simply placing a water cell or a lava cell into the drill slot. The miner would then drain all the respective liquid within its range into the pump that, on its turn, will fill empty cells with the drained liquid. The result should be a large dry hole (I don't know if it's possible to make this, but it should not let water regenerate itself, really draining it from the world). Useful to drain a lava lake on the nether to feed some geo-gen.
I'm sorry if this suggestion was already made, I did a little search but I'm afraid it may not have been as extensive as it should.
Cheers
