From Hand-Mining to a Fully Automated Production Line in MineMogul: A Let's Play Building a Physics-Driven Mining Factory

When the game starts, the player is placed in a space containing rocks that look mineable, a PC desk, and a helmet. Following the quest display in the upper left of the screen, the streamer picks up a pickaxe, lifts the mined ore, and drops it into the delivery box, earning a first $3.74.

After mining for a while, the streamer goes shopping on the computer. This time they choose a magnet that pulls ore toward it. The purchased item is "left at the door" in front of the entrance. With the magnet, there's no more need to pick up ore one piece at a time, and the streamer praises how convenient it is. After breaking every rock in the mine, carrying the collected ore to the open area, and shoving it into the delivery box, they earned about $4,000.

Using that $4,000 as starting capital, the streamer buys an automatic drill. All it takes is placing the drill on one of the several ore deposits in the mine and connecting it to the delivery box with a conveyor, and this became the first piece of automation. The streamer describes it as "passive income you can earn just by sleeping."

They then added more drills, expanding to four running at once. The streamer reports that earnings rose from about $1 per second to about $4 per second. With money to spare, they also installed an analyzer that displays selling prices.

A quest asks for crushed iron ore, so the streamer introduces a crusher that breaks ore into smaller pieces. Since this machine takes ore in from the top, they connected the route with a sloped conveyor. Completing this delivery unlocks the blast furnace, moving the game into the smelting stage.

There are three types of ore—iron, copper, and gold—and smelting them mixed together fails. So the streamer used a sorter that diverts only items matching whatever is placed in its basket. Since coal and gems also come down the conveyor, they first send only the three ore types to the crusher, then split them three ways by type and feed them into the blast furnaces. This created an automatic smelting system. They also introduced a polisher that buffs ingots to raise their value, increasing the income from ingots.

As more drills were added, the conveyors started to look like they were about to overflow. The streamer first placed dedicated machines in various spots to grind unneeded coal down into smaller pieces. Their view is that conveyors get extremely congested as the factory expands, so the smaller the items being carried, the better.

The most congested spot is the downstream smelting area where all the lines converge. For that reason, the streamer says it's better to handle this kind of primary processing as far upstream as possible. At the time, ore was being carried from two upstream lines, so they placed a crusher on the upstream side of each, shrinking the ore before the lines merged. This freed up conveyor capacity and made it possible to add even more drills upstream.

To increase mining output further, the streamer heads deeper into the winding mine. Laying down conveyors for hauling as they go, they eventually reach a large space with ore deposits. Here they adopt a plan of completing both mining and smelting upstream, sending only ingots and gems downstream. The finished upstream factory complex handles crushing, smelting, and polishing, then sends ingots and gems downstream. The streamer remarks that, strangely enough, looking at a factory complex like this seems to put their mind at ease.

Next, they relocate the old factory complex that was downstream. They gather nearby raw resources in one place with conveyors and build another factory complex in a suitable space. This finishes moving the old factory complex upstream, and the downstream side becomes a place that only receives ingots and gems—an organized layout ready for future expansion.

From here, the game enters the processing stage. The streamer first buys a machine that turns ingots into plates and places it temporarily to see how it handles iron plates. However, the processing speed didn't seem to keep up with the input speed. Judging that it would eventually overflow, the streamer switched to splitting the input in two and processing it with two machines. This completed the iron plate processing system. Since plates are very large and tend to clog conveyors, they replaced the conveyors near the output with high-speed ones.

Once the plate delivery quest is done, the next task is processing rods. Rods and plates are both made from the same ingots, so it was just a matter of swapping out the processing machines. The size was also nearly the same, so they fit right in. This created a processing factory for the three kinds of rods.

After delivering the rods, the streamer tackles pipes, the final product in the game. The machine that makes pipes from plates is unlocked, but it's large, and with the previous design there was nowhere near enough room to produce all three types. On top of that, a quest to deliver each and every product is still ahead, so separate processing areas are needed for plates, rods, and pipes.

So the streamer scraps the previous design and starts on a different one. The concept is to simplify things by separating the plate factory from the pipe factory: plates flow from upstream onto two conveyors, with one delivered as-is and the other processed into pipes.

In the line put together after about 10 minutes of struggling, ingots flowing in from the back are split onto two conveyors, left and right, and both are processed into plates and passed over to the conveyors on the opposite side. One is delivered as-is, and the other is processed into pipes. This completed the delivery line for plates and pipes. At the other ingot intake, they built a new rod factory and assigned it to deliver ingots and rods.

With that, the automated line producing every product was complete. The ore deposits in the mine were nearly exhausted, and simply leaving the game running would finish all the quests, so the streamer wrapped up the playthrough here while expressing some reluctance to say goodbye.

However, while they took a short break and left the game idle, trouble had occurred. Ore clogged and overflowed the machines, overflowing ore filled the mine tunnels and made them impassable, and there were so many overflowing objects that the FPS dropped to 0 and they couldn't move at all. The streamer cites these as troubles unique to a physics engine and says they enjoyed them as a gameplay experience characteristic of this game.

Finally, the streamer introduces the game as an automation game that has only just entered early access, with no complicated mechanics, making it easy to pick up and play.