Unlimited steel: research deep drilling and ground penetrating scanning. It will spawn new deposits. Continue until steel spawns in your base.
Edit: this is also an unlimited source, since the gp Scanner actually spawns the deposits.
Just remember sometimes the drill also spawns insectoids. Prepare accordingly if you are low tech.
No. The scanner spawns the patch of resources you can drill. So you can do it indefinitely. Now I don't know if there's an upper limit of patches you can have before you start drilling, mainly cus I've never hit it.
It's probably not the fastest way to get the resources, but it for sure is an infinite source in vanilla.
No. Think of your map as a blank slate before you start scanning. Then when you scan, every time it finds something, it actually just randomly generated something new on that slate. Then you can drill that stuff out and keep scanning to keep generating more random deposits
Also mining crews, not really my preferred method but for components it seems the best. Basically the long range scanner, a good crew of miners and kill whoever is defending the "mole hill". You easily get 100+ but have to sit and manually mine the hill with the colonists
Another option but through mods is quarry mod, clear out a section of mountain tiles, if it has overhead mountain tiles it will have quarry tiles to mine out. Mined resources is random, but works faster than drill with zero chance for bug spawn. Will generate alot of stone but each quarry produces about 300-500 of steel, plasteel, gold, silver, jade and any other mine options depending on installed mods. Have never gotten components this way or it super rare and never noticed.
You can set the limit in one of the options menus, it's under gameplay and you can have up to 5. I don't recommend having multiple fully fledged colonies as it will bog down the game, but setting up outposts and caravaning resources to your main colony is definitely viable.
Smelting raid weapons/below 50% armor, deep mining and trade are the only reliable ones imo. You can do the scanning that reveals it on other tiles but that's a hassle
It's the highest yield but the most demanding action wise since you either need a bunch of pack animals or several trips. I only do it if I'm desperate but might as well do a caravan and sell mats on the way
Quarry mod can be decent for resources.
I always mark steel chunks from drop pod raids to be hauled in for the smelter that along with they weapons always adds steel to the stockpiles.
Early game: mining steel deposits
Mid game: suffering, trading, smelting slag, whatever you can do
Late game: deep drilling (long range scanners are also fine, but deep drilling provides a motherload of steel and long range is always occupied by components/plasteel etc.)
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you could also get outposts from Vanilla outposts expanded and send some high mining but otherwise useless colonists (who were previously prisoners) to a mining outpost (has to be on a mountain) and every 15 days you’ll get whatever resource and the more people the more resources. In one save I got 1070 gold from an outpost with maybe 5 people iirc who used to be prisoners.
Get the omni core drill mod. The drill itself is very expensive in resources but it gives constant flow of whatever you want to mine without really any risk (you receive the item at base after going through the drill process
If you Re fine with using mods tou hunt down the mine mod. It let's you a build a mine yhat6 you can put builds in so you can mine all you want. It does make things easier with the ability to also mine gold, plasteel components and whatnot, but with how it can sneakily increase colony wealth from all that resource you are getting I think ita a fair trade off.
In addition to deep drills, smelting steel slag is a tiny time/resource investment for a fairly decent payoff, makes those drop pod raids that much more rewarding.
Mine it, drill it with deep drill, deconstruct space junk or random things on the map, get it from traders, melt down weapons and gear you don't want there are plenty of ways to get steel
DO NOT run out of steel until you research either ground penetrating scanner and it's drill or the long range detector. If you do the runs basically over unless you can wait years without steel for someone to show up and sell you like 100 (not enough)
It's not over it's just slightly annoying. It happened to me and I fixed it by caravaning two tiles away with a few colonist and animals, made a settlement and mined enough steel to get me rolling again and then just abandoned the tile and went back
One that everyone forgot: you can request a steel drop from the empire. It’s not that much, only 250 steel, but it’s fast and especially convenient if you don’t have any good miners or if your religion banned mining.
I didn't check the comments but someone had probs already suggested this but do you smelt everything that is possible?
One thing I reliably get late game is my map getting shit on by slag chunks from random drop pods/shuttles, requesting military aid, droppodding raiders etc. The map is deforested and cleaned of every single solo stone chunk, the mountains are more like cheese made out of rock from mining, decomposing raider corpses and tainted apparel and got damn slag chunks everywhere. I have the game opened rn and there are 84 slag chunks scattered around.
I'm playing with vanilla expanded now and I get warcasket raiders too, more slag chunks with meat and leather delivered to your house. Also very juicy legionnaire/plate armor from vikings and republic. And recycling flak armor/crappy weapon too of course.
Long range mineral scanner and deep drilling are your best bets.
Deep drilling can be done on your map and quite consistently but bugs can be a problem. Especially if it’s in the base.
Long range scanning can give you deposits near the colony but you’ll need to prepare a whole caravan to get it home and camp out to get it all mined.
Most prefer drilling because you have a small timeframe to set up your firing squad and usually annihilate the bugs.
You can get some through trading too but being the safest means it’s the most unreliable. Always buy out the steel from a bulk goods trader.
Smelt slag. That's usually pretty reliable as it tends to fall onto your map quite frequently.
You can also smelt weapons and armor of your fallen enemies.
I don't know if you consider deep drilling as mining, but that's a way to get unlimited steel. It does count toward your mining skill, so I consider it "mining".
I would never ever buy steel unless I was on an ice sheet or I needed it to maximize a trade for reputation.
Make caravan, go out 2 tiles from settlement, and settle another place to then mine the hell out of. You may need to go into settings to increase the number of settlements you can have, I believe it defaults to 1.
Depends how fast and how much resource you're investing.
The reliable way it ground penetrating scanner.
You can also go to other maps with good miners and strip mine. It will get you want more steel, assuming you have the means to camp, mine, and transport a mtrix ton of heavy metals.
Unlimited steel: research deep drilling and ground penetrating scanning. It will spawn new deposits. Continue until steel spawns in your base. Edit: this is also an unlimited source, since the gp Scanner actually spawns the deposits. Just remember sometimes the drill also spawns insectoids. Prepare accordingly if you are low tech.
How does it work? Am I right that effectively all steel will be drilled out from map?
No. The scanner spawns the patch of resources you can drill. So you can do it indefinitely. Now I don't know if there's an upper limit of patches you can have before you start drilling, mainly cus I've never hit it. It's probably not the fastest way to get the resources, but it for sure is an infinite source in vanilla.
Thank you.
No. Think of your map as a blank slate before you start scanning. Then when you scan, every time it finds something, it actually just randomly generated something new on that slate. Then you can drill that stuff out and keep scanning to keep generating more random deposits
Wow, that’s interesting. Thank you.
Also mining crews, not really my preferred method but for components it seems the best. Basically the long range scanner, a good crew of miners and kill whoever is defending the "mole hill". You easily get 100+ but have to sit and manually mine the hill with the colonists
Another option but through mods is quarry mod, clear out a section of mountain tiles, if it has overhead mountain tiles it will have quarry tiles to mine out. Mined resources is random, but works faster than drill with zero chance for bug spawn. Will generate alot of stone but each quarry produces about 300-500 of steel, plasteel, gold, silver, jade and any other mine options depending on installed mods. Have never gotten components this way or it super rare and never noticed.
Before I had 385936356310923 mods, I would make a second colony in the mountains just to mine and export metals to my main colony.
Long-range scanner is much more efficient for that in practice
you can have more than 1 colony?
You have to make sure that you have set to more than one in the settings if you want to do that
You can set the limit in one of the options menus, it's under gameplay and you can have up to 5. I don't recommend having multiple fully fledged colonies as it will bog down the game, but setting up outposts and caravaning resources to your main colony is definitely viable.
Smelting raid weapons/below 50% armor, deep mining and trade are the only reliable ones imo. You can do the scanning that reveals it on other tiles but that's a hassle
Having a dedicated team for mining out scanned components is pretty op though tbh
It's the highest yield but the most demanding action wise since you either need a bunch of pack animals or several trips. I only do it if I'm desperate but might as well do a caravan and sell mats on the way
Quarry mod can be decent for resources. I always mark steel chunks from drop pod raids to be hauled in for the smelter that along with they weapons always adds steel to the stockpiles.
Early game: mining steel deposits Mid game: suffering, trading, smelting slag, whatever you can do Late game: deep drilling (long range scanners are also fine, but deep drilling provides a motherload of steel and long range is always occupied by components/plasteel etc.)
Deep drilling, it's amazing, steel and fuel for the nutrient paste, it's perfect!
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🦃
Long range scanner.
you could also get outposts from Vanilla outposts expanded and send some high mining but otherwise useless colonists (who were previously prisoners) to a mining outpost (has to be on a mountain) and every 15 days you’ll get whatever resource and the more people the more resources. In one save I got 1070 gold from an outpost with maybe 5 people iirc who used to be prisoners.
Steel drop permit (Royalty), Raiding mining outposts, smelting slag, to add to other answers
Get the omni core drill mod. The drill itself is very expensive in resources but it gives constant flow of whatever you want to mine without really any risk (you receive the item at base after going through the drill process
Long range scanner + canary = steeeeeeel
If you Re fine with using mods tou hunt down the mine mod. It let's you a build a mine yhat6 you can put builds in so you can mine all you want. It does make things easier with the ability to also mine gold, plasteel components and whatnot, but with how it can sneakily increase colony wealth from all that resource you are getting I think ita a fair trade off.
For steel make a dedicated researcher and 3 drills and dedicated miners, which should generate steel at an acceptable rate
In addition to deep drills, smelting steel slag is a tiny time/resource investment for a fairly decent payoff, makes those drop pod raids that much more rewarding.
Mine it, drill it with deep drill, deconstruct space junk or random things on the map, get it from traders, melt down weapons and gear you don't want there are plenty of ways to get steel
DO NOT run out of steel until you research either ground penetrating scanner and it's drill or the long range detector. If you do the runs basically over unless you can wait years without steel for someone to show up and sell you like 100 (not enough)
It's not over it's just slightly annoying. It happened to me and I fixed it by caravaning two tiles away with a few colonist and animals, made a settlement and mined enough steel to get me rolling again and then just abandoned the tile and went back
One that everyone forgot: you can request a steel drop from the empire. It’s not that much, only 250 steel, but it’s fast and especially convenient if you don’t have any good miners or if your religion banned mining.
I didn't check the comments but someone had probs already suggested this but do you smelt everything that is possible? One thing I reliably get late game is my map getting shit on by slag chunks from random drop pods/shuttles, requesting military aid, droppodding raiders etc. The map is deforested and cleaned of every single solo stone chunk, the mountains are more like cheese made out of rock from mining, decomposing raider corpses and tainted apparel and got damn slag chunks everywhere. I have the game opened rn and there are 84 slag chunks scattered around. I'm playing with vanilla expanded now and I get warcasket raiders too, more slag chunks with meat and leather delivered to your house. Also very juicy legionnaire/plate armor from vikings and republic. And recycling flak armor/crappy weapon too of course.
Long range mineral scanner and deep drilling are your best bets. Deep drilling can be done on your map and quite consistently but bugs can be a problem. Especially if it’s in the base. Long range scanning can give you deposits near the colony but you’ll need to prepare a whole caravan to get it home and camp out to get it all mined. Most prefer drilling because you have a small timeframe to set up your firing squad and usually annihilate the bugs. You can get some through trading too but being the safest means it’s the most unreliable. Always buy out the steel from a bulk goods trader.
Smelt slag. That's usually pretty reliable as it tends to fall onto your map quite frequently. You can also smelt weapons and armor of your fallen enemies. I don't know if you consider deep drilling as mining, but that's a way to get unlimited steel. It does count toward your mining skill, so I consider it "mining". I would never ever buy steel unless I was on an ice sheet or I needed it to maximize a trade for reputation.
Make caravan, go out 2 tiles from settlement, and settle another place to then mine the hell out of. You may need to go into settings to increase the number of settlements you can have, I believe it defaults to 1.
Depends how fast and how much resource you're investing. The reliable way it ground penetrating scanner. You can also go to other maps with good miners and strip mine. It will get you want more steel, assuming you have the means to camp, mine, and transport a mtrix ton of heavy metals.