Power Drills

Lore & Background

The first time a player sets a Mining Drill on a patch of iron ore and watches the little machine whir to life, there is a quiet satisfaction that is hard to overstate. The drill hums, the power line glows, and one by one, iron ore units begin to flow into the connected belt. It is the moment the alien planet stops being a landscape and starts being a supply chain. The world of Factorio is vast, dotted with scattered resource patches that seem almost randomly placed, and the drill is the tool that says: this rock belongs to the factory now. As the player's ambitions grow, the humble Mining Drill gives way to the Advanced Mining Drill, which churns out resources at a noticeably faster clip but demands a correspondingly larger energy supply. Pumpjacks and Advanced Pumpjacks play the same role for oil, their distinctive silhouettes bobbing above dark, viscous pools that seep from the ground. The progression from a single, slightly underpowered drill to a sprawling array of advanced extractors, each tethered to a carefully routed power grid, mirrors the broader arc of the game: from fumbling survival to industrial dominion. There is also a subtle, almost philosophical layer to drills in Factorio's design. They are the one machine type that does not transform anything. A furnace smelts. An assembling machine builds. A drill simply takes. In a game obsessed with conversion and complexity, the drill is the purest expression of extraction—raw, unmediated, and absolutely essential. Every circuit, every rocket part, every alien artifact ultimately traces its lineage back to a little machine sitting on a patch of ore, humming in the alien twilight.

In Their Own Story

The dust had settled on the fourth day, or what passed for a day under the twin moons. Kael wiped grease from her forearms and stared at the new Advanced Mining Drill she had just bolted onto the copper patch. The old one—the original, the one she had placed with shaking hands in the first hour—sat three meters away, still connected, still humming, but now it was just… backup. A memory of how small the operation used to be. She tapped the power line with her boot, feeling the faint vibration that meant the grid was holding. Somewhere behind the curtain of conveyor belts and furnace stacks, the solar panels and the first steam turbines were doing their quiet work, feeding the current that kept every drill, every pump, every assembler alive. The copper ore was already stacking up in the buffer, a neat little pyramid of orange-brown chunks. "Right," she muttered, pulling up the schematic on her wrist display. "Now the silicon. And then the advanced circuits for the next tier of drills." She looked out over the patch, where the copper ore glittered faintly in the low light, and felt the familiar, terrifying thrill of a factory that was about to get bigger. The ground was only going to give so much. She was going to need every last drop of it.

Reader's Guide

The core production chain for a basic Mining Drill runs: Iron Ore → Iron Plate (furnace) → Steel (steel furnace, requires coal); Copper Ore → Copper Plate (furnace); Iron Plate + Copper Plate → Electronic Circuit (assembling machine); Iron Plate + Copper Plate → Copper Cable (assembling machine). All of these converge in an assembling machine to craft the drill itself. The Pumpjack follows a similar path but substitutes a Pipe (iron plate + steel) for the copper cable. For the Advanced Mining Drill, the chain extends further: Sand → Glass (furnace) → Silicon (assembling machine, requires water); Electronic Circuit + Silicon + Copper Cable → Advanced Circuit (assembling machine). The Advanced Pumpjack similarly requires Advanced Circuits and additional pipes. The typical bottleneck in the early game is steel production, since the steel furnace is slower than a regular furnace and coal supply is often limited. As the factory scales, the silicon and advanced-circuit chain becomes the new constraint, because it demands a dedicated glass-and-silicon pipeline. Optimal ratio: for every Advanced Mining Drill you need roughly one Advanced Circuit, which in turn needs one Silicon, one Electronic Circuit, and one Copper Cable. Plan your assembling-machine slots accordingly. Scaling tip: place drills in clusters of three to five around a single power pole to minimize wiring, and always leave room to swap a basic drill for an advanced one without rerouting the entire power grid. The game allows you to place a higher-tier drill directly on top of a lower one, preserving the connection—use this to upgrade incrementally as your power budget grows.

Did You Know?

• You can place an Advanced Mining Drill directly on top of an existing basic Mining Drill to upgrade it in place, preserving the power connection and any existing belt routing—no need to dismantle and rebuild.
• A single Pumpjack can extract oil from an oil field even if the field is only partially covered by the drill's mining area, meaning you do not need to perfectly center it on the patch to get output.
• Drills in Factorio do not consume the resource patch; the ore or oil regenerates over time, so a well-placed drill can keep extracting indefinitely as long as it has power.
• The Advanced Pumpjack and Advanced Mining Drill have a higher mining speed but also a proportionally higher energy usage per unit of resource extracted, so upgrading drills without upgrading your power grid can actually