Subscribe to download
World Eater

[not updated since original posting in 2017 - this should still be functional but not compatible with CPU or Mass/Volume stuff. If your interested in this it may need some modifying in creative. This might still have a valuable use as a mass land clearing tool for underground building or cavern creating.]

21 laser drill terrain clearing machine. Over the default block limits.

Requires using "sbp" command to spawn for Single player survival. [note: the ability to turn off block limits was added to difficulty options, if this is off you can build normally, although it's pretty expensive in E. and Z.] For MP server must have block limit disabled.

Highly reccommend testing it in creative first. Also reccommend trying different colors with replace all, on any blue area.

Not really meant for mining ore deposits. (it would be comparable to eating cereal with a shovel)


Drills spaced about as wide as they can be without leaving too many small dirt triangles. It still occasinally creates some, which can be cleared with player drone or the drill turrets. Can be reduced by moving drills around slightly as you mine forward.

Clears roughly a 16m x 48m area. About 8x24 large blocks. (One picture above shows how I measured this).

Enough thrust to drill directly down and reverse out, although in practice this can be tricky with the drills bumping tunnel sides.
Seemed to work best when pointing down no more than about 45 degrees, creating a gentle slope till at the depth you want to clear out, then going level and strip mining layers untill the area is clear. Fixed drill mode (shift+o) works well to create a relativly smooth tunnel - could poteintally be used to make underground "roads" to different areas on a planet.

A lot of levers, signals, and sensors. Mostly labeled with LCD's.
The hover engines turn off when you walk out a door, and turn on when you enter (this was an attempt to make it lower to the ground when you exit and raise up when you enter, but It seems to get frozen in the air with the hover engines off, instead of falling). Was blueprinted with hovers off, enter from a door the first time you spawn it.

Docking pads on the roof for clipping it to the bottom of a CV, and docking pads on the bottom for large CV or base docking.

Shutter roof area for launching player drone from inside.

318 tons
158 thrusters
425 rcs
loads of fuel, oxygen, generators

15m/s forward or backward, 5 m/s side to side.
(stats screen is a bit misleading on the yaw rating - it's so wide that .8 is actually pretty sensitive)
The down thrust comes from a couple decorational upside down hover engines.

The 4 laser drills mounted on the back are just decorational "replacments". Currently impossible to activate more than 21.

Pictures show a Super-Warp-Sled and a Mini-warp-sled (both on my workshop). Super warp is just wide enough to fit these from the front ramp.

warning: that many thrusters together have a pretty loud roar, may want to have your volume down when you first start moving it around.

I've made a version with the drills stowed for travel, availible here:
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1201582852


This was built more as an experiment to see how large an area could be cleared with drills, and to see if a grid of 21 drills could be used in a similar fashion to the more typical small hover miners. Using the new copy/paste and selection box features made placing the drills and other floating items fairly easy. The actual vessel is pretty much a box of rcs and thrusters, with a lot of fancying up.