Do you enjoy farming and building but not spending so much time in the mines? Do you like the feel of Vanilla but wish that Minecraft had just a bit of automation? Do you play Survival but can't go through the tedium of getting thousands of blocks for your builds? Then this is the mod for you!
The first "tier" is the Stone Drill. It mines in a straight line top to bottom. Add coal or charcoal to its inventory manually or with a hopper and see it start dropping the mined materials! The drill will extend some structure blocks to indicate the mined area. Don't worry, these are just for show: they'll be broken when you break the drill.
The mined materials are actually dropped two blocks above the drill. This allows for a simple contraption to obtain them and put them in a chest:
However, the Stone Drill is slow, can only break the same blocks as a stone pickaxe and is very inefficient: it needs a whole piece of coal for every mined block! So when you have a few more materials, you should upgrade to:
The Iron Drill. This one is twice as fast, can break through harder blocks and uses a more efficient fuel source: the Biofuel. I tried not to stray too far from Vanilla with this mod but I think adding a fuel was a necessity for balance reasons.
You can craft a whole stack of Biofuel with a piece of coal/charcoal and eight of your preferred crop:
A stack looks like a lot, but when you have a few drills running you will see you never have enough crops!
Drills have the obvious drawback of only mining in a column, plus they get stuck if they reach water, lava, or a material that they can't mine. So drop a dozen drills here and there (or go mining, but then what is this mod for?) and start farming a ton of crops for the next step:
The Gold Quarry! This is what you wanted, right? You will need a little bit of redstone for this one.
The Gold Quarry mines in an area of 7x7 around its position, starting from the level directly below itself. It is faster than the Iron Drill, but will actually take much longer to dig a complete hole because it goes block-by-block. It also uses Biofuel as its source of power, so be ready to use hundreds of potatoes (or apples, who am I to judge?) if you want to get anywhere.
This quarry will dig through water and lava, but not obsidian! For that we need to go one last step further:
The Diamond Quarry. Craft it with diamonds (obviously), obsidian and a bit of redstone. For this one you'll have to make a trip to the Nether because it uses a different (and more efficient) fuel: the Netherfuel. Original, right?
This quarry mines an area of 11x11 blocks, and can break any block until reaching the Bedrock layer. It will take it's time, though. So get a few chests worth of Netherfuel and let the quarry do what it does best.
You can check the rest of the recipes in-game if you have JEI installed, but here they are anyway:
I like the mod as-is, but maybe I'll add another tier of quarry in the future. 15x15 perhaps, but I don't really see a reason for it. I think it would be too "mod-y" for a Vanilla+ playthrough, and the Diamond Quarry is already pushing it.
This is my first uploaded mod so expect a few bugs, I suppose.
Mineuniverse