Build a control station, write its orders, and release a swarm of drones that fly through solid rock, cut out exactly the ores you asked for, and carry them home.
No quarry, no holes the size of a chunk, no pickaxe. Swarm Miner drones phase through stone and break only the blocks your program names — the landscape stays as it was, apart from the ore that is no longer in it. You decide what is worth fetching, in what order, how far to look and how hard the swarm should work. Then you go and do something else.
When you want more, you program it and upgrade it — both below.
The Program tab works like a Digital Miner filter list, with one thing it never had: order is priority. The higher a filter sits, the sooner the swarm goes after what it matches.
c:ores/diamond, c:ores/*.c: tags.Upgrades are items that sit in the station's six module slots. They stack, and you can take them back out at any time.
| Module | Effect | Useful up to |
|---|---|---|
| Drone Bay Module | +1 drone in the air at a time | 7 (8 drones) |
| Overclock Module | +25% flying and digging speed | 8 (3× speed) |
| Survey Range Module | +1 chunk searched in every direction | 2 (a 5×5 chunk area, configurable) |
| Smelter Module | Cooks the ore in flight — with its own filter list | 1 |
| Ancient Ores Module | Lets the swarm mine the ancient ores, which drones otherwise leave alone | 1 |
Ancient ores are locked behind their own module. Any block in the swarmminer:ancient_ores tag is skipped by every station without an Ancient Ores Module — even with Take everything or Inverse on. Out of the box the tag holds the c:ores/allthemodium, c:ores/vibranium and c:ores/unobtainium ore tags, and it is simply empty in a pack without them. Modpack makers can add their own late-game ores with a datapack.
Energy grows with the upgrades, not with the ore, and never with the distance. A bare station is cheap to run because it earns little. Every module you fit multiplies all of the station's costs by 1.15, so a fully upgraded swarm is fast and very hungry. Mining a diamond costs the same as mining coal, and a vein on the far edge of the area costs the same as one under the pad. The Swarm tab always shows the current cost per ore.
Each drone carries up to 576 items (nine stacks) before it flies home, so every round trip is worth making. When the cargo hold is full, drones wait in a ring above the silo until there is room.
A handheld with a home screen of apps. It sees every loaded station in your dimension, at any distance, and runs on its own FE battery that only drains while the screen is open. You install apps by crafting cards:
And when a station runs out of ore, you get a pop-up telling you so — "Mining complete" or "Nothing to mine" — wherever you are.
config/swarmminer-common.toml.You may include Swarm Miner in any modpack, public or private, free or monetised, provided the pack is distributed through an official platform (CurseForge, Modrinth) that downloads the mod from its official source. No need to ask.
Third-party add-ons and compatibility patches are welcome, as long as they do not bundle or redistribute this mod's files. The full terms are in LICENSE.txt inside the jar.
The tablet's in-hand pose is taken from Create: Redstone Link Tablet by FryD42 (MIT licence) — thanks. Full attribution is in LICENSE.txt inside the jar. Every sound in the mod is synthesised.
Created by DNomad. Copyright © 2026, all rights reserved, with the modpack and add-on exceptions above.
📦 Other projects: curseforge.com/members/dnomad/projects
Bug reports and ideas are welcome — the mod is actively developed.
