Mining

Mining is one of the most important aspects of the game. Mining removes terrain and gives you a resource depending on the area that is being mined.

Method
Mining in Empyrion can be done through a variety of methods; hand-held tools (the drill and survival tool), hover vessel drill modules, and capital vessel drill turrets. Mining is performed by looking at a part of the terrain and pressing the Left Mouse Button by default. The Right Mouse button is used with certain tools. The Basic Drill can change between terrain mining and rock mining modes, and the T2 Drill changes between a variety of modes. Currently, the Right Mouse Button has no use for Drill Modules and Turrets.

Using the basic Drill results in small chunks of ore dropping after mining a piece of terrain. However, the T2 Drill places mined ore directly into your inventory, and ship-based drills place them into any attached Harvest Boxes.

In previous versions of the game, the Left Mouse Button would drill quickly, using more fuel, and the Right Mouse button would drill slower and using less Drill Charge.

Reputation Loss
Mining on a Resource deposit inside an other factions territory can cause a reputation loss.

Terrain Flattening
The drill comes equipped with a terrain flattening mode. This mode excavates parts of the terrain much quicker than the default mining mode, but gives no chunks. It is most useful for removing large areas of land that you need to flatten for building bases underground.

Terrain Filling
In older versions of the game, a filler and flattening tool existed to handle flattening and filling, but now this functionality is added to the Drill, which you can use to fill in areas you didn't mean to drill into. This is very handy when trying to fix any structural integrity issues in bases that you build.

Experience
Mining gives experience. Destroying a terrain/deposit/meteorite with tools gives a constant amount of 2xp/drill charge and gives certain amount of XP depending on the type of resource if a resource chunk drops.