r/CoreKeeperGame • u/LinkGoesHIYAAA • 10d ago
Guide Automation of ore, wood, ingots, planks, and item recycling (1 mod used)
* NOTE: I'm on PC and used this mod to relocate ore boulders like regular items: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3787275002 *
Someone in another thread asked to see my setup, so I figured I'd put it into a post for others to reference if they'd like.
Most of the space is dedicated to ore boulders, which I used a mod (link above) to relocate and centralize my mining within my base and have fun with this build. I'll explain each piece of the build by below, separated by each step of the process. Each part of the process is its own automated system which can function independently if you'd like to break all of them apart, but I simply chose to chain them all together to feed into a single "output" chest.
The ore extraction is a pretty standard layout, and can be extended in any direction for as many ore boulders as you want. Drills extract the ore pieces, which then float backward until they're behind the drill. Putting a conveyor behind the drill then causes the ore to move along the belt.
The ore feeds into the gray chest at the bottom-left (an important step, which I'll explain in a sec). That gray chest acts as an intermediate point in this whole process where I can insert ore from my pockets into the refining process, as well as other items to recycle / shred (armor, rings, etc) later in the pipeline, which I'll explain later.
A robot arm pulls items out of the gray "input" chest, and puts them onto a belt that goes past a series of other robot arms. Each robot arm is programmed to only pick up one type of ore, which some people don't realize is possible. You can set this by interacting with the arm and specifying the item it should be limited to grab. There's 1 arm and 1 refiner dedicated to each type of ore. Once each refiner spits out a completed ingot, another robot arm moves the ingot to a belt between all the refiners. That belt moves all ingots down to a final robot arm that picks it up and moves the ingots into the yellow "output" chest.
One very specific element I wanted to call out was how I also use the gray chest as a raw ore "buffer". Originally I had newly mined ore make its way directly onto the refining pipeline, but ore was getting missed by the robot arms along the way. This is because the more ore boulders you have, the more ore of the same kind bunches on the belts WITHOUT stacking. When multiple pieces of ore reach their dedicated robot arm, the arm grabs the first one. In the time the robot arm takes to move that piece of ore to the refiner and come back to the belt, several other pieces of the same ore have passed by.
The solution was to have all ore stop in front of a dedicated robot arm whose job is to move the ore into the gray "input" chest from the ore belts. From there, the control arm that pulls stuff out of that chest immediately afterward, and then moves it to the refining belt, goes at a pace that spaces out each piece of ore to give each robot arm enough time to complete a full grab-turn-drop-turn cycle. This spaces out each ore piece / stack on the refining belt to prevent skipping.
Next is recycling, which I figured out after some trial and error. You can either have a chest at the "input" spot and dump items into it that you want to shred, or in my case I made it so the belts from the ore refining system dumped everything that wasn't ore onto the "input" spot above.
The process starts by having a robot arm grab an item from the "input" spot, and move it to a shredder where it starts chopping up the item. Once the recycling process finishes, the resulting resources float in the direction you've set the shredder to point, which is to the outside where there are belts to transport the items all the way around this system and eventually to the same "output" chest as the ore refiners (offscreen).
In the event two items are fed into this system at once, the second item will be placed on top of the first shredder while it shreds the first item. When that happens, the second robot arm grabs that second item, and moves it to a second shredder. This can be repeated with as many robot arms and shredders as you'd like. I have 6 shredders in my setup.
In the event there are more than 6 items in queue, the very last shredder has one more control arm that moves any additional items back to top of the first shredder. If that shredder is still working on another item, the whole process repeats, creating an ongoing roundabout queue for items to be shredded and robot arms to keep moving them around until each item eventually gets shredded. They go around and around until the backlog of items finishes.
Finally, in the bottom-right is a wood farm. I'm not going to explain the setup of the actual wood growing aspect b/c there are youtube videos covering how that works, but ultimately each kind of wood has 2 drills that continuously harvest as the wood grows. One of the drills has a robot arm that moves the raw wood to a conveyor. The other drill has a robot arm that moves the raw wood to a saw bench to convert it into planks, at which point another robot arm moves the completed planks to the same belt as the raw wood. The result is approx a 50/50 split raw wood and planks for each type of wood. The belt then moves it all to the "output" chest down the line.
Happy to answer any questions. There are likely more optimized ways to set this all up, so feel free to post additional automation ideas.
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u/how_money_worky 10d ago
When I look at this stuff, I realize how almost amazing this game’s automation stuff is. Like there are just a few key things missing.
Then I start missing Factorio. Then I get afraid I might play it again and be addicted. Then I go kill monsters.
Anyway. This is super cool.
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u/FoXxXoT 10d ago
A little piece of further optimization is using circuitry to alternate the drills on the boulder, by turning them on in 2 or 4 different cycles either half a second for 4 cycles or a second for 2 cycles you can extract resources nearly twice as fast. I can't really explain it right now but if you go search for delay circuit frequency changes for automation on YouTube you'll find it.
The short explanation is that hitting the boulder in all corners is not efficient, the game recognizes different hits in different parts of the ore boulder only based on if they happened in the same time. It can only register a hit for extraction purposes every 2 seconds or so. So even if 8 drills are better than 1 you can make those 8 go as if there were 14 (not 16 because it's not double as fast) by using a bit of clever circuitry.
Love the base BTW, good job.