Mining Drill 13

Lore & Background

In the Factorio community, "Mining Drill 13" occupies a strange liminal space. It is referenced in forum threads, speedrun commentary, and meme posts as the hypothetical next step beyond the Electric Mining Drill—a machine so advanced it would mine raw starlight or compress time itself. None of this is true. The game's tech tree is finite, well-documented, and ends where it ends. Yet the myth endures because Factorio's design philosophy—steady, incremental escalation from a single hand-crafted pickaxe to continent-spanning automated empires—makes the player's brain genuinely expect the ladder to keep climbing. The joke also serves a softer purpose: it is shorthand for the emotional peak of a long playthrough. By the time a player is laying down the last belt of a fully automated uranium line, the initial Mining Drill that started it all feels almost sacred. Inventing a "Drill 13" is a way of saying, "I have outgrown the game, but I am not ready to leave it." It is a fan's love letter disguised as a fake wiki entry. Wube Software has never acknowledged the meme in patch notes, and no mod in the official repository is titled "Mining Drill 13." The item remains, as it must, a ghost in the machine—present only in the collective imagination of players who once stood in a dirt field, placed a single drill on a patch of iron ore, and watched the first tiny stack of ingots roll down a belt.

In Their Own Story

The cursor hovers over the research tab. It is 2:47 a.m. The factory hums its endless, mechanical lullaby—pistons clacking, belts whispering, the low thrum of a dozen electric mining drills chewing through copper ore in the moonlit valley beyond the fence. You scroll past Logistic Science, past Advanced Circuits, past the final rows of the tech tree. Nothing. No greyed-out slot. No shimmering icon with a little "13" etched into a drill head. You close the tab. You place your hand over the keyboard. Outside the window, the in-game sun is rising over a landscape that is, in every way, exactly as it was when you started: green hills, grey rock, a single strip mine scar. But the scar is bigger now. It stretches to the horizon. And at its edge, one small, unremarkable Mining Drill still sits where you put it on day one, still mining, still faithful, still the only drill that will ever matter. You save. You do not open the tech tree again.

Reader's Guide

Because "Mining Drill 13" does not exist, this guide covers the actual mining-drill progression in Factorio so readers know exactly where the ladder stops. The base Mining Drill is available from the start (or very early via basic technology). It consumes 60 kW and mines iron ore, copper ore, and stone at the base rate. The Fast Mining Drill, unlocked through the Fast Mining technology (which requires Basic Circuits as a prerequisite), doubles the mining speed at the same 60 kW draw. That is the entire chain. There is no fourth tier, no numbered sequence, no hidden drill. In a typical progression, players transition from the basic drill in the first few hours, swap to Fast Mining by the time they are producing iron plates in bulk, and graduate to Electric Mining once their power grid is stable—usually around the 15-to-40-hour mark depending on playstyle. For blueprint sharing, mining drills interact with the standard blueprint/book system: you can copy a drill's placement, paste it across the map, and include it in a blueprint book for sharing. Community designs rarely center on a single drill, but large-scale "drill farms" (hundreds of drills in tight grids with shared power and logistics) are a common and beloved build pattern. The tech tree does not gate blueprint usage, so a player can paste an Electric Mining Drill blueprint even if they have not yet researched the technology—the drill simply will not function until the prerequisite is met.

Did You Know?

• Factorio has exactly three mining-drill variants in the base game; the idea of a numbered sequence like 'Drill 13' is a community invention with no basis in the code or design documents.
• The Electric Mining Drill is the only drill tier that requires an active electrical connection to function, making it the first mining tool that integrates with the power grid.
• The base Mining Drill can mine iron ore, copper ore, and stone—three of the four mineral types in the game. Uranium (and later, rare earths in mods) requires a different approach.
• The Fast Mining Drill and the Electric Mining Drill both double the base mining speed; the difference is their power source and consumption, not their throughput.