Hello! I'm Dave. Welcome to my humble little guide for Hydroneer! I'll go over some basics of how to get started, how to earn enough money to buy your first set of automatic mining machines, tips on how to build and expand your automated process machines, how to get the improved fishing rods. Then I'll provide a slightly modified version of the game's map that details which stock markets like which items, which shops sell what items, and how much each dig site costs. Then I'll go over the details of each mining location, to help you plan for your future enterprises. I MIGHT even go over how to use the Steam Workshop mods... but I am not yet sure if I want to get into those.

This guide is for people who want a written reference encyclopedia / user manual sort of thing. The best way to learn about this game is to ACTUALLY PLAY IT. The second best way is to get on YouTube and watch some videos. I highly recommend you search for the Youtuber "HybridSteel" since he does some FANTASTIC instructional videos about this game. I promise you won't hurt my feelings if you watch him instead of reading this. But if you really want to READ something (with illustrations of course) then I'm here for you.

This guide is written for version 2.0.2, in late May 2022 (lots of 2's there LOL). If you're reading this super far into the future, certain things might have changed.
(4/17/23) We're up to version 2.2 now. there's FARMING (grow vegetables, cook them into a soup, give soup to villagers for money), and there's QUESTS, and the Anvil has been redone so you can build anything out of ANY metal, and they've got TIER THREE mining now.
Hi, this is Krez, the editor here. I'm currently updating the guide to 2.2. Farming won't be included (for now), but every other change should be, in a few days.

• Creative Mode: shop sells an hourglass that lets you set the time of day; shop sells a special water filter that is INVINCIBLE and one of them produces PURE water; shop sells a "creative wand" that lets you duplicate and delete items with a single click; you can take items from the shop without paying; shop sells a flight cap that lets you FLY
  
• Each time you load your save, you have the option to toggle Creative Mode on or off. If you start in Creative Mode and then turn it off, you keep any of the "magic" items you got from the shop.
  
• Using Creative Mode makes the save "dirty" permanently - it disables achievement on that save.
  
• Each dig site has its own sort of "puzzle" to figure out where the water source is, and then how to dig it so that all your machines, pipes, and belts will fit.
  
• Bedrock is "invincible" - the HARD EDGE of the dig site. Drills will not work on it, and you cannot shovel through it. Some dig sites have bedrock walls that go straight down, others have sloping bedrock walls.
  
• To make weapons or jewelry, you need to REHEAT your metal bars first, then put it on the anvil.
  
• Gem compressor can do multiple gem types together, you get one big gem of each type.
  
• Smelters can only melt ONE type of metal at a time. If you put 1 gold in a crucible and add 100 iron, you're gonna have a bad time (don't do it).
  
• T1 tools can only dig T1 dirt - down to 8 blocks deep.
  
• T2 tools can dig T1 and T2 dirt - down to 14 blocks deep.
  
• T3 tools can dig T1, T2 and T3 dirt - down to bedrock.
  
• If you dig at certain spots, you will find Relics hidden underground. Put them on the platforms in the cave between Ember Cradle and the fish stock market.
  
• Digging deeper will give you HEAVIER ore nuggets, but it will not change the ODDS of finding different ores.
  
• Digging dirt and then placing it somewhere else converts it into the "tier" of the NEW location. So don't shovel dirt from 22 blocks deep and bring it to the surface to run a T1 iron drill. That drill will only give you ore from its own elevation (ZERO).
  
• Belt splitters need an item placed on the top shelf, then they push THAT item in that direction. Everything else continues forward.
  
• Shard pressure tanks (they should've been called repressurizers) are ONLY required if you put them a long way from your intake pipe.
  
• To boost pressure at the intake pipe, use the INTAKE BOOSTERS that you can build at the Icehelm ANVIL, each intake pipe can hold up to four of them.
  
• Water pressure affects the speed of conveyors and machines, but it's not a linear relation (see more at the end).
  
• In the very beginning, if you can dig VERY FAST then digging makes more money than fishing... but if you want to be a bit more relaxed then fishing makes decent money in the very early part of the game. I'll assume you want to relax a bit, and so I will include a chapter of the guide about fishing.
  
• To get more drills and harvesters, go to Icehelm. Then buy max ONE of each blueprint for COINS. Bring it to the ANVIL and follow the instructions on the wall (place the blueprint on the pedestal, put the metal in the crucible, pull the lever). If you use too little or too much metal, all the extra metal is going to pop out at a shelf below the ANVIL. Take the blueprint off to empty the crucible without casting.
  
• "Logic" = "Math" or "Programming." That's why it works with data cables. Think of it like you make some kind of input, and then it produces an electrical signal output that is equal to some number. The next step in the logic process takes that number as input, does something to it, and outputs a signal with a new number value.
  
• Every machine in the game can be operated manually. But "logic" lets you build a circuit to make it automatic if you want to do so.
  
• Dirty water causes machines and filters to take damage. FIVE filters will produce "pure" water - which will NOT damage anything downstream from that fifth filter. You can place 4 filters on 1 straight or T pipe.
  
• Filters take damage when water is flowing.
  
• Filters take constant damage when placed on the same pipe as a (closed) valve.
  
• Repairing filters becomes cheaper than repairing drills once you have at least 2 drills and 1 harvester.
  
• IF an item's durability drops to zero, it breaks. Fix it by hitting it with a wrench (also called a SPANNER). Or you can use a logic circuit to make repairs happen AUTOMATICALLY when the durability drops below a certain level - you just need to remember to come back and reload the repair guns every so often.
  
• If your truck flips out and you're inside, Use the "Unstuck" or "Recall Vehicle" buttons then to get it back on the road. If that didn't help you can exit the game (Alt+F4) and reload the save.
  
• If any ore or other item is moving when you save your game, loading back in will cause it to freeze in mid-air and you'll have to go pick it up and move it by hand.
  
• The Steam Workshop has mods but use at your own risk. Mods disable achievements.
  
• To use any of the mods you NEED to get "HML" and "TheRFCModShop" mods first. Then a few of the others require "Hydrotility++" as well, so read the mod description before you subscribe to it.
  
• If you decide to use mods, the Mod Shop will show up in the city of Bridgepour, inside the creepy old castle. You'll know you're in the right place if you see slot machines in the room. If you don't use mods, the castle will be empty and basically ruined. It's right behind the pipe and tool shop that is under the dinosaur skeleton.
  
• T1 pipes and machines limit max pressure to 180.
  
• T2 equipment accepts 370 (368) max pressure.
  
• T3 has max pressure of 510 (508).
  
• Max pressure is equal to a same-tier quad-boosted water intake's pressure.
  
• Machines function quite efficiently ABOVE HALF of max pressure of the equivalent pipe. It's nonlinear.
  
• The weakest link in a pipe system (INCLUDING shard chambers) limits downstream pressure.

• Game does not save velocity on items! So if you log out and then re-load the save, any items that were falling will no longer be in motion. You'll notice rocks and ores "getting stuck" on belts or in mid-air.
  
• Best way to avoid problems is to SHUT OFF ALL OF YOUR DRILLS, then shut off water and wait long enough for all the items to go through hand sorters (if any), then log out.
  
• Trying to pick up a pan or crucible with more than 50 ores or so (or other items) inside it will kill your fps, and theoretically could crash the game. That one pan with 50 iron nuggets requires processing power as if it was 51 items in motion. Always empty your pans periodically.
  
• If you have an issue with an item "not working" or "not being buildable" like it should, save your game, exit the game, reboot the game, and load your save. This will fix it 99% of the time.
  
• Using a magnet on a pan or crucible will pull all the ore out of it. (This is an intentional game feature, not really a glitch, just something to watch out for to avoid making a mess of your ore.)
  
• (This is also not really a bug, just something to watch out for.) Most items have "clipping" which means you can't build two items on the same grid block, even if logically it looks like they will not actually touch each other because they occupy different parts of the grid block.
  
• If you get the truck stuck in an un-driveable place, hit ESC and use the "Unstuck" button there if you are inside the vehicle, or "Call Nearest Vehicle" if you're outside the vehicle.
  
• The truck has a ton of glitches that will make it spaz out and somersault into outer space. You can have fun flying your truck around, but when you're done you can fix it by saving your game, exiting the game, coming back and loading the save. The truck will just DROP from where it was, straight to the ground. If it lands in an un-driveable place, hit ESC and use the "Unstuck" button if you are INSIDE the truck at the time... or hit ESC and use the "Call Nearest Vehicle" button if you are OUTSIDE the truck at the time.
  
• If you "afk" your mining machines WITHOUT AUTOMATICALLY SORTING ORE INTO SMELTERS, you'll end up with so many items making a huge mess on the floor that it will be a pain in the butt to clean/organize it all... or it may even crash your game immediately next time you try to load the game... or it may crash/lag your game when you get too close to that part of the island again. So don't afk for more than an hour unless you have all your items being sorted by belts into smelters and gem compressors. And remember to compress your gems about every hour or so.
  
• You want to stack items in a pile, but it won't let you? Try jumping and drop it in the air, might work. Try to "build" the item, raise it up, then drop it while still in the build grid. That might work.
  
• When you try to dump a pan of metal ore into the crucible to make a bar by hand, aim well with dropping indicator or some of the ore will MISS THE CRUCIBLE and spill all over the floor. Super annoying. Just sayin. There is an item "Magnet on a Stick" that can help with the cleanup..
  
• It is possible to get into a hole that you can't climb out of, or get stuck under/behind your machines, or otherwise end up stuck somewhere. If this happens to you, hit ESC and use the "Unstuck" button there.

** NOT A GLITCH but a new feature: Placing your drill at or above the surface layer will NEVER produce any Cloutium or Corestone ore. You must dig at least one cube deep in order to find any Cloutium and at least one cube below T2 dirt to find Corestone.**

NOTE: I play with an XBox 360 controller so I'll list the controls for that setup. IF you are using keyboard/mouse or some other gamepad, your buttons will be different but the action will be the same. A list of the controls can be found - and reconfigured - in the game's options menu.


L-stick: walk around or steer the truck if you're driving one.
R-stick: look around without walking; aims your "drop target reticle" for items that can be dropped or poured, AND fine-tunes the aim on your "active target reticle" too.
A: jump (or ascend in fly mode)
B: crouch (or descend in fly mode)
X: (when hands are EMPTY) pick up the item that is highlighted in ORANGE
X: (with something in your hand) drop the item that is in your hand, will fall where your "drop target reticle" points; if you HOLD X you can be more precise and drop the item a little farther from you.
Y: (when LOOKING AT a hat or truck) put on a hat, or get in/out of a truck
LT: cancel build-mode
RT: (when looking at a "useable" item) pull a lever, turn a handle, push a button or use the item where your "active target reticle" is pointing.
RT: (when holding a "useable" item) activate the item in your hand - dump a bucket or pan, dig with a shovel or pickaxe, cast a fishing rod, etc.
RT: (when holding a "buildable" item) start build-mode - show the construction grid.
RT: (when already in build mode) confirm placement and build the item at the selected location
L-Stick & R-Stick: (when already in build mode) use the analog sticks together to choose a location for building your item.
D-Pad: (when already in build mode) Rotate the item you want to build on THREE axes. D-Up for one axis, D-Left for another axis, and D-Right for the final axis. Some items can only be rotated on one or two of these axes, the other D-pad arrows will have no effect.
START: open the menu AND open a browser window to the main Wiki page
SELECT: open the wiki page
ESC: open the menu WITHOUT opening the Wiki page

** Since update 2.0.6 there is a new addition to the in-game menu: an option to change the color of your "item drop reticle" to make it easier for you to see - because the default grey one is nearly invisible in some situations. **

• BEFORE YOU SAVE YOUR GAME AND LOG OFF, YOU SHOULD TURN OFF ALL YOUR CONVEYOR BELTS OR CONVEYORS AND DRILLS. Any item that is FALLING (from a conveyor belt) will FREEZE IN MID-AIR until manually picked up when you load your game. Frozen items can lead to clogging
  
• You'll notice tools come in "tiers." T1, T2, T3. The ONLY difference between the tiers is how deep they can dig/operate. T1 is for "tier 1 dirt" from the surface down to 8 blocks deep. T2 can go down into "tier 2 dirt" 14 blocks down. T3 works until bedrock. The shovels alnd pickaxes clear the same amount of space out of the dirt no matter what tier the tool is. Higher tier tools can be purchased in Bridgepour.
  
• Higher water pressure increases the random chance to get extra nuggets from harvesters.
  
• Deeper = heavier ore nuggets. Depth does not change the percentage of each type of ore that you get. (NOTE: verified for gems, iron, gold, and cloutium, we haven't tested with the new material added for version 2.2 yet.)
  
• If you dig dirt from very deep, then dump it somewhere higher up with a shovel, it will "magically transform" into the higher dirt. And vice versa. The tier level of the machines needed, and the weight of your ore produced depend ONLY on the CURRENT depth of dirt where you are operating. Not where digged dirt originally came from. (So you can use the shovel to dig T2 dirt and dump it into a T1 harvester on the surface level... but then it processes the dirt as if it CAME FROM the surface instead of the bottom of T2. Or you can bring T2 dirt from 14 squares deep, dump it underneath a T1 drill operating at 3 squares deep, and the drill will work... but the ore you get will represent 3 squares deep not 14 deep. Or you can use a shovel to dig surface dirt, bring it down 14 squares deep, and shove it under a T2 drill and that drill will now operate to produce 14-deep rewards.)
  
• T1 drills, harvesters, shovel, and pickaxe can only dig T1 dirt - which only goes 8 blocks deep. Any deeper than that and you'll need at T2 or T3 setup which is VERY EXPENSIVE.
  
• You only get ONE drill and ONE harvester that you can purchase with coins. If you want more, go to Icehelm and buy ONE blueprint for each item... then use the blueprint to build your own drills and harvesters using metal ores on the giant ANVIL. It's not that expensive if you automate 1 drill.
  
• Drills only operate if there is diggable dirt under the drill bit.
  
• You can run hundreds of drills into a single harvester. Harvesters now work as shredders for big pieces of dirt.
  
• Use the Centralizer Hook to keep your ore nuggets in the middle of the belts. Nuggets that get too close to the sides of the belts don't always end up where they're supposed to go and can lead to clogged belts and a big mess.
  
• Cloutium and Corestone are VERY RARE. No matter how deep you dig they will be rare. But deeper digging = bigger nuggets. Corestone is needed in crafting T3 drills, harvesters and water pressure boosters. Cloutium is for T2 and T3 machines.
  
• Onyx is EXTREMELY RARE and will always be rare. Deeper digging = bigger nuggets when you do find it. Onyx is "the best gem" in the game, worth a ton of money.
  
• They added a new material for version 2.2, Corestone, that is also quite rare, needed for building T3 machinery.
  
• You can sell ore nuggets and gems. Or you can smelt them into bars for a value increase. You can forge the bars and gems into jewellery and weapons for a further increase in value.
  
• Increases (pre-2.2): 33% for iron bars, 18% for all other bars (not tested for corestone), 55%-67%-67%-83% for ruby-sapphire-onyx-emerald, 10%-20%-30% for dagger-axe-sword, 10%-20% for ring-necklace.
  
• You can stick to the META (most efficient tactic available). Slight spoilers because you can discover the META on your own: use all your iron bars, cloutium and corestone to make drills, use gold to craft swords, use tiny bars and compressed gems to craft necklaces (necklaces are cheaper than swords unless you play the stock market), and do quests.
  
• You can build MULTIPLE LAYERS in your mine. Build one layer of drills etc. on the surface (for tiny ore nugget rewards). Then build a second layer as deep as you can dig with your T1 shovel (for slightly bigger ore nuggets). Then build one at the bottom layer of diggable T2 dirt, too (for more nugget size). Continue in that way into T3 dirt, too.
  
• Remember about the "Unstuck" button and the "Call Nearest Vehicle" button in the ESC menu. You'll use them pretty often.
  
• When you first move into a new mining site, make a note of where the water source is. Without water, you have no power. Without power, you have to dig by hand with a shovel.
  
• Trucks use WATER as fuel, you'll have to fill them up when they run out of water. You can build a pipe to drip water on them automatically at your mining sites.
  
• The truck WILL spaz out sometimes. To fix it, SAVE the game, EXIT the game, and then RE-LOAD your save to drop the truck back onto the ground. Then use the UNSTUCK or CALL VEHICLE button from the ESC menu to get it back on the road.
  
• On the ESC menu, note the location of the "Clear Dirt" button. This deletes any dirt nuggets that have been dug up. It does not affect ore nuggets, uncut gems, polished gems, metal bars, shards, etc. It only deletes dirt nuggets.
  
• Also on the ESC menu, note the location of the "Clear Raw Resources" button. This deletes the following: dirt, ore, shards, uncut gems. ALL of them in the game will be deleted. Your pipe boosters will be emptied of shards. Your sorting conveyors WILL NOT lose items that tell them what to sort. Be careful if you hit this button and have nuggets inside a pan!! NOTE: items kept in a SAFE should not be removed this way (not tested in 2.2).
  
• TNT and nukes will damage nearby machines when they explode!!
  
• Valve, filter, flow meter, etc. attach directly to STRAIGHT or T pipes on all sides.
  
• Try to have a valve, then FIVE water filters on the inlet of your pipe, before connecting any machines to the line. Five filters will give you "ultra-pure" water so it won't damage your machines. FILTERS WILL TAKE DAMAGE OVER TIME AS LONG AS THEY'RE CONNECTED TO AN INLET. The valve lets you turn the water off BEFORE the filters, so your filters won't be damaged while everything is shut down. Broken filters act as closed valves.
  
• Inlet boosters attach directly to inlet pipes, and provide instant boost to the pressure.
  
• Shard chamber REPLACES a straight pipe, and sets the pressure at that point equal to whatever the inlet pressure is (including INLET BOOSTERS), but not above the chamber's own tier's max pressure throughput (iron chambers limit pressure to 180).
  
• You can put Cloutium inlets on iron pipelines so you don't have to use the expensive iron pressure boosters. Same with putting Corestone inlets on Cloutium pipelnes.
  
• When building a conveyor system, parts must be attached in this order: pipe, pipe attachments, conveyor belt, conveyor belt attachments. Doing things in a different order will make certain things fail to snap into place properly.

First, you need to find all the free tools that you start with. Your first mining area is right in front of you (noted as "Ember Cradle" on the map).
You have a river (with a bridge crossing) right in the middle of your plot, you are free to mine inside the BARE SOIL AREA on both sides of the bridge, and you can use pipes to pull water out of the river to run your machinery later.
But for now you have no money and no machines... so let's just start with the stuff you get for free.

Right next to the street lamp there is a shovel and a hand-lantern.
Pick up the lantern with the X button and press RT to turn it on. Carry it over to what you feel is a good spot to start digging, and press X to drop it on the ground. It doesn't provide much light, but it's better than nothing. Go back to the sign-post and pick up the shovel there. Drop it near your lantern in the dirt for now.
By the river, you'll find a pan, a brush, a bucket, a town map, and a wooden cart.
These are all yours, too. Take the small bucket and drop it by your shovel. Take the brush out of the pan and drop it on the dirt by the river, next to the pan.
Drop the pan into the river to fill it with water, then pick it back up and put it on the dirt next to the brush. (Note that pans and buckets will not spill even if they land upside-down!!) You can leave the cart and map alone for the moment.

I like to start digging on the right side of the area (when looking at it from the main road), and then I have the left side be my processing area. But you can set it up however you like. Just pick a spot and dig all the way down to the bottom. Remember to leave yourself a ramp/stairs so that you can climb back up out of the hole as you dig deeper. But it's not as simple as "dig out of the hole, dump dirt on the ground" because if you want to make money then you need to put the dirt in the bucket.

So pick up the shovel with the X button, point it at the ground, and press RT to dig. Then aim at the bucket (it will highlight the bucket in orange) and press RT to empty your load into the bucket.
It takes four loads to fill a bucket, and if you miss the bucket it just dumps your dirt on the ground so you'll have to dig it up again. Once the bucket is full, put your shovel down and pick up the bucket. Go to the river, aim at the pan so that the "target drop" icon (the grey circle below your RIGHT HAND, not the white/blue aiming circle in the center of the screen) is inside the pan.
Press RT to dump the bucket's load into the pan, the water will turn to mud. Drop the bucket and pick up the brush.
Press RT when aiming at the pan to clean the dirt off of any ore you dug up, you'll be rewarded with some ore nuggets! That's what you want. Those are worth some money.

Now is a good time to mention there are TWO aiming circles in this game. One is your VIEW-RETICLE, it is in the center of the screen at all times, it determines what you are focusing your ATTENTION on. So it highlights objects that you can pick up or activate. The other one is grey and will MOVE depending on your position and the geometry of the ground and objects on the ground. This shows where whatever is in your hand will be dropped or dumped.
Useful for trying to drop an ore nugget into a pan, or for aiming your bucket of dirt that you are about to dump.

Your first ore nuggets, HOORAY. But it's too early to celebrate, it's probably only worth around 10 coins. So you need to drop the pan back in the water (with the ore nugget still inside, it will be fine). Pick it back up and put it on the sand again. Grab your bucket, go back to the hole, dig more dirt, dump the dirt into the pan of water, brush it off, rinse and repeat. Eventually your pan will start getting pretty full of ore.
After maybe 20 buckets of dirt get washed off, pick up the bucket and take it up the road to the JEWELER shop (check the map if you are totally lost) - there is one in the old castle on top of the hill nearby. Put the whole pan on the table and then aim at the red button that tells you how much coin you will earn. Press RT to sell everything (except you will keep the pan). Grab the coins from the pot on the floor, drop them inside your pan, grab your pan and run back down the hill.

If you have MORE THAN 55 COINS now, you're golden. If not, go dig some more ore out of the dirt. The fishing rod costs 52 coins I think, go buy one as soon as you can afford it. If you have extra money, also buy a cot.

To use the cot (or any production machine - including standing torches) you have to "construct" it not just drop it with the X button. While holding it in your hand, press RT to enter construction mode. Use L-stick and R-stick to aim the item to the spot where you want it, then use the D-pad to rotate it in three axes into the proper alignment. Then press RT again to build it, or press X to drop it without actually building it, or press LT button to cancel the build without dropping the item. Once built, you can use the Construction Hammer - pick it up, aim at the item, press RT to tap it, and now it will be nailed down so you will NOT be able to pick up the item ever again!! Helps to avoid accidentally picking up the wrong item. If you need to move it later, you can get the construction hammer out and tap it again to "pull the nails out of the floor." Once the item is built, some of them need you to aim at it and press RT with empty hands in order to activate it. Such as the cot - press RT to sleep on it and move time ahead to the next morning, because those nights are DARK and it's hard to work when you can't even see your tools. Or a valve for pipes - aim at the handle and press RT to turn the water on or off.

Pro tip: Creative Mode shops sell an hourglass item. If you take it back to your mine, you can press the buttons to move time backward, forward, or pause it entirely. Useful if you HATE the dark and only want lots of sunshine. Or useful to make it always night-time so you need to use more torches to see... whatever you want to do with time, it's your business don't let me stop you. This item is ONLY available if you check the Creative Mode box when you load or start a game.

Now you bought your first fishing rod. Yay. As you leave the shop that is right near your first mine, turn right. Go past the cave and find the little lagoon dock on the right side of the next little shop. On a wall there, you'll see a glass case with a NEW fishing rod inside.
To get it, you'll have to drop a specific type of fish - shown on the sign - into the basket and then hit the red button. Once you purchase that rod, you can forget about the previous one... or you can buy yourself a fishing rod stand and put all the old rods on there for display as you buy the upgraded rods.

I'm including a list below showing what kind of fish is needed to unlock each fishing rod. They must be unlocked in the order shown; you have to unlock the second one before the third one, etc.If you accidentally catch one of the fish needed to upgrade your rod later, KEEP IT IN A SAFE PLACE until you're ready to trade it in. Some of these fish have ridiculously low chance to be caught, so make sure you don't sell a fish that you're going to need later. It does not seem to matter where you fish, or what time of day you fish - all water has the same chance to catch each fish, it only changes if you use a different rod. If you manage to collect all the rods, the upgrade shop resets and you can start the process over again to get extra rods, starting with an extra Wonky Pole - but you'll have to trade another fish for it.

Rod::Upgrade Cost::Description

1. Fish Trap::$41::automatically catches a fish every 3 minutes, must be manually emptied to catch another fish, catches small and cheap fish 99% of the time.
   
2. My First Fishing Pole::$52::You'll catch boots or cheap fish roughly 97% of the time.
   
3. Wonky Fishing Pole::Prawn::You'll catch boots or junk roughly 95% of the time.
   
4. Ol' Slipy Grip::Puffer Fish::You'll actually start noticing that you catch better fish like Tuna.
   
5. The Place Holder::Crab::It's just okay.
   
6. Emerald Fishing Pole::Swordfish::Now you'll start catching some monkfish and sharks.
   
7. A Reel Dream::Monkfish::"Ain't she a dream?" Yes, yes she is.
   
8. Night Rod::Shark::Your fish will be noticeably bigger now.
   
9. Master Fishing Pole::Lobster::Wow, that lobster is a REALLY rare catch!

In the early part of the game, fish will earn you more coin than mining does! Different fish are worth different amounts of money per pound (if you buy the Scales you can check the weight of your catch - or your metal bars - before you sell them). Sardine, Herring, Mackerel, and Cod are essentially common and cheap. Boots are junk, barely worth anything. The rest of the fish are rarer and worth more per weight. ALL the fish you catch will be roughly the same size (0.8 - 3.8 kg) so don't expect any true "giants of the deep" here.


Ok, to make easy money from fishing, here's what you should do:

1. Put a pan near the river bank and have the wooden cart nearby too.
   
2. Get your rod ready. Make sure your "drop sight" is aiming into the pan.
   
3. Press RT to cast the line.
   You'll notice the bobber (some people call it a "float" - same thing) will bounce on the water slightly a few times... then it will make a BIG bounce and a sound effect will play.
   
4. Press RT again EXACTLY when you hear the sound effect to catch a fish.
   
5. If you positioned the pan right, your fish should drop directly into the pan.
   
6. Repeat about 20 times or so, until the pan is full of fish.
   
7. Carry the pan up to the shop where you can upgrade your fishing poles. The Stock Market there will buy fish at an adjusted price. The price changes over time, if the arrow is RED it means they give you less money than the regular price at the jeweler, so go sell it at the jeweler shop instead. If the arrow is GREEN, they pay more than the jeweler shop so sell it here. They take ALL kinds of fish, but only fish. There are other stock markets around the island that will buy different items, this is the only one for fish and they ALWAYS take fish here.
   
8. Once you earn around $250, put about five of the fish traps in the river, side by side. These will automatically catch a fish for you every 3 minutes or so. They cost around $45 or something like that, your first 3 or 4 fish caught with them will pay for the trap, so they can be useful for getting "free fish" to sell. However, they can only hold one fish at a time so you have to actively check and empty the traps if you want to make money from them.
   
9. You might have caught some boots, or some fish that were too big to fit into the pan. Pick them up and put them in the wooden cart for now, then sell them when the cart gets pretty full.
   
10. Check your fishing traps for more fish. Put your pan back in place. Get your rod out again, and catch more fish.
    
11. Pro tip: use the construction hammer to nail your fish traps in place. Now you won't accidentally pick up the trap when you're trying to grab the fish inside it.

Fun fact: hold a fish over a small forge for about 10 seconds and you can cook it. But this does not change the price of the fish. Hold it over the fire for 15 seconds and it burns, reducing the value to 1 coin regardless of how heavy the fish was or what type of fish it was.

Just keep repeating that cycle for now. Your goal is to earn enough coins to purchase the following items (946), all of which are available for sale at the shop right next to your first mine EXCEPT for the scales:

• inlet pipe (1)
  
• straight pipes (6)
  
• valve hook (1)
  
• buckets (3)
  
• pans (6)
  
• construction hammer (1)
  
• grinding wheel (1)
  
• crucible (1)
  
• small forge (1)
  
• casting mold (1)
  
• anvil (1)
  
• blacksmith hammer (1)
  
• scales (1) - optional for now, sold in Bridgepour tool shop.

Once you have that stuff, you'll want to get back to digging a deep hole, you're out of "baby mode" and getting ready to start designing your first automatic mining system. But if at any time you get tired of digging that hole, remember you can always go fishing for a little while to take your mind off of things, and it will still earn you a few hundred coins at a time.

Rule of thumb for mining: the deeper you dig, the bigger your rewards will be. The first mining site only goes down a short way before you hit bedrock, but even that little bit of depth will make a difference.

The point of this section is to familiarize you with how basic mining works, what you can do with all that dirt, ore, etc. that you dig up, how to use basic pipes and mining machines. In later chapters we'll move on to how to use conveyor belts and build an automatic mine. "You have to learn to crawl before you can run."

You should now have all of these items, which you did not have before you started fishing. Just set them off to the side until you are ready to use them.

• inlet pipe (1)
  
• straight pipes (6)
  
• valve hook (1)
  
• buckets (3)
  
• pans (6)
  
• construction hammer (1)
  
• grinding wheel (1)
  
• crucible (1)
  
• small forge (1)
  
• casting mold (1)
  
• anvil (1)
  
• blacksmith hammer (1)

The inlet pipe is the first item we want to actually BUILD in the game. Certain items are built (or "placed") onto a grid so that they can be used in conjunction with other items that will align to the same grid. Pipes, mining machines, conveyor belts, walls, floors, standing torches, furniture, scales, anvil, and small forge. All of those must be BUILT in order to operate properly. Press RT while holding the item to open the build mode, you'll see the grid outlined in green. Look/walk around until the item is in the right place. Then use the D-Pad to rotate the item until it is facing the right direction. Press RT to built it, or press LT to cancel the build, or press X to drop the item from that location without actually building it. The hologram will turn BLUE if it is able to be built there, or RED if you cannot build it there.

The inlet pipe has to be built UNDERWATER with just the curved end of the pipe sticking out above the water. Once built, it will always be pumping water for free, and if the end of the pipe isn't sealed it will drip water constantly. Dripping doesn't affect anything besides your sanity. The iron inlet pumps at 100% pressure rating; there are also Cloutium inlets you can buy later that will pump at 250% pressure rating and Corestone inlets which pump at 510% pressure rating. Pipes (straght, T, and elbow) will SUBTRACT pressure rating from the inlet at X pressure points per piece of pipe. Iron pipes subtract 3, Cloutium pipes subtract 2.5, while Corestone pipes subtract only 2. If it drops to zero, conveyor belts past that piece of pipe stop moving and machines work at their lowest speed. Straight and T pipes can take attachments (filters, valves, pressure checks, etc.). There is a pressure check attachment that will show you how much pressure is currently in the pipe, but we don't need it yet since this first setup will be quite short. Tying two inlets together with a T pipe WILL NOT double your pressure, it will behave as if there is only one inlet connected. If you connect pipes from two inlets farther down the line, they pump against each other resulting in zero pressure. (I'll repeat this in the chapter about automated mines when we really start to use pipes.)

Build your inlet pipe now, a good distance away from your hole. Put it in the river. Then attach all five of your straight pipes to the inlet so it drips water on solid ground. Now build a valve hook on the straight piece of pipe that is directly attached to the inlet. (Later, we'll use filters on the remaining five pipes.) Aim at the valve, and press RT to open/close it. This starts/stops the flow of water in all pipes downstream of the valve. (This becomes VERY IMPORTANT later). Now pickup the Construction Hammer, aim at the inlet pipe, and press RT. Notice the orange outline vanishes. This "nails it down" so that you can't pick it up - useful for preventing yourself from accidentally picking up the wrong item if there are several things near each other. You could hit it with the hammer again (or RMB) to un-pin it. For now, go ahead and nail down all the pipes and the valve that you just built.

Note: when moving pipes with attachments, picking up the PIPE will grab the pipe as well as EVERYTHING attached to it, as a single unit. Picking up the ATTACHMENT will remove it while leaving the pipe in place. Anything that says "hook" in the item description is supposed to attach to pipes. Conveyor belts, valves, pressure checkers, water filters, etc.



With your small pipe system in place, put your pan directly under the dripping water. You no longer need to pick up the pan to fill it in the river! It will just auto-fill from the drip every time you brush it. Take your extra buckets over to the hole. Now you can shovel more dirt before you leave the hole, fill up all the buckets before you put the shovel down. Then haul the dirt to the pan, dump it in, brush it off, dump the next bucket in, brush it off... dig more dirt, rinse and repeat. Just like you were doing before, except now with MORE BUCKETS and AUTOMATIC WATER.

Build your grinding wheel somewhere convenient but not in the way of the dig.

Pull any uncut gems (emerald, ruby, sapphire, onyx) out of your washing pan and hit RT on the grinding wheel to polish them into finished gems (worth more than uncut). Set a pan next to the grinding wheel to hold these cut jewels. Anytime you get roughly 20 jewels in the pan, it's time to take it to the shop and sell the gems.


Once you get about 20 ores in your washing pan, it's time to sort them because any container with more than 30 items will make your game stutter and drop FPS as soon as you pick it up. Get four more pans ready, then dump your wash pan and sort your items. You will be finding iron, gold, Cloutium, Corestone, Shards, and uncut jewels. I already told you how to deal with the jewels. The rest can each go into their own pan. Shards are not worth any money, but can be smelted into bars that are used as fuel for certain machines and pipe systems... we'll discuss them more a little later, for now just set them aside. The metals are good for making metal bars, which can then be forged to make items that sell for more money than raw ore. For now you will sort by hand. Later I'll discuss how the sorting machine works.



Be CAREFUL when you're dumping your pan or bucket. Things tend to spill if you try to move too much ore at one time and don't aim perfectly. If you miss the crucible spilling hundreds of nuggets you'll have to go buy a magnetic stick to help you clean up the mess. But the magnetic stick will also pull any not melted nuggets out of a pan or crucible!


Put a bunch of ore (must all be the same type) into the crucible (looks like a witch's cauldron). Pick up the full crucible and drop it into the small forge's fire. (You don't actually need to drop it, just hold it over the flame.) It will glow red-hot, then a sound effect will let you know when the ore has liquefied. In case you drop mixed ores in the crucible, the first ore that lands there will delete all non-matching ores.

Pick up the hot crucible, aim into a casting mold, and dump the liquid to make a bar. This can be done with iron, gold, cloutium, corestone or shards but NOT gems. Bar form adds a bit of value compared to raw ore nuggets.

Bars can be sold to the stock markets (or jeweler), or you can forge them into items that add even more value. Gold bars and iron bars each have a specific stock market that will buy them, you cannot sell different kinds of metal at the same stock market. But the jeweler shops will buy EVERYTHING you put on their tables. Check the map further down this guide to see where the stock markets are located.

If you want to know how heavy your bar will be before you make it, buy the Scales and build it somewhere (preferably near your anvil).

Drop your pan full of ore nuggets on the scale and it will tell you how much it weighs, and also what the jeweler will pay for it all. Then you can smelt the bar and weigh it again - the weight should be the same but the value will go up. Later on, you'll need to buy blueprints for some advanced machinery. These require metal bars of a certain weight to purchase, so it is a good idea to learn how to use the scale now. If you make a bar too heavy, use the saw to chop it in half.

Now you have some metal bars and polished gems ready, we can use the anvil to forge items that add even more value to the ingredients. Weapons require BARS, jewelry requires BARS + GEMS. The total weight of your metal doesn't matter, you can make a sword with three 1 kg bars or a 1 kg bar and two 500 kg bars, but you need THREE separate bars. For jewelry it does not matter which gem you use. Whatever the total value of ingredients is, that value will be multiplied by a percentage that is determined by the blueprint you are building. First, build your anvil (press RT while holding it, place it by grid). If you aim at it and press RT, the recipe shown on it will change. The list below shows what items you need in order to craft various things.

• Dagger - 1 bars, +10% price
  
• Ring - 1 bars & 1 gem, +10% price
  
• Axe - 2 bars, +20% price
  
• Necklace - 2 bars & 1 gem, +20% price
  
• Sword - 3 bars, +30% price

Therefore, it only makes sense to craft swords until you can compress gems.

Polished gems are ready for use without any further processing, though later you'll be able to use a Compressor to turn several small gems of the same type into one bigger gem. The metal bars need to be heated up again before use though - so drop the bar directly into the small forge's fire until it turns red-hot. Putting it in the crucible first will cause it to melt!! (In case you want to add more weight to a bar, you can mix it with more of the same ore nuggets in the crucible and melt it down again.)

Gather up the required materials and drop them in the correct spots on the anvil. Then pick up the Blacksmith Hammer and press RT (left-click) to use it on the anvil, and POOF you've forged an item.

Each stock market buys ONE item type: fish, weapons, jewellery, gems, gold bars, or iron bars. And as usual the jewelers will buy any of your things. It's more efficient (especially time-efficient) to sell your items at the closest jeweller's and use that money to upgrade your mining rig than it is to keep driving between stock markets and waiting days upon days for a good price.

Now you know how to forge an item, so STOP FORGING ITEMS (except for forging swords just once per a jeweller visit). Making bars and forging items is a time consuming process if you have to do it by hand like this. And right now you're still stuck at the first mining site with "baby's first try" equipment. Later on you can AUTOMATE most of the mining process including smelting the bars, which means the only thing you will have to do by hand is use the anvil to create a finished product. And by then, since MORE ORE in a bar means MORE MONEY when that bar is sold (or when an item forged from that bar is sold), the automated smelting process makes BIGGER BARS so you will make money faster that way. Our goal is to reach a point where we can set all of that stuff up, but it will require a mining site with a larger area to play with... and before we can afford a new place I should also teach you how to use basic machines like the drill and sorters. So the next chapter will be an introduction to machinery, and that lesson will be given as a continuation of your current "my first mine" location at Ember Cradle.

Before we continue, let's briefly recap the various ways you can make money in this game. You've already tried most of them, the next step will be to buy machines to automate your mining process.

• Fishing - stock market is located near the shop that upgrades fishing rods, not too far from your first mining site at Ember Cradle
  
• NEW! Sell quest items to get tokens you can use to set up a farm with farm equipment bought in the new farming village.
  
• Dig a mine, wash the dirt, and sell the ore - basic ore and uncut gems can only be sold to the jewellers
  
• Polish your uncut gems and sell them - can be sold to the jewelers or the farthest stock market, outside of Icehelm - don't even bother going that far because the market can be red (below the jeweller's price).
  
• Compress your small polished gems into bigger compound gemstones - same as the regular polished gems, but worth more money and forging them saves a lot of time
  
• Collect iron ore and smelt it into bars to sell - the stock market is up the hill from your first mine at Ember Canyon, in the old castle. Or go to the jeweller's if the market is red.
  
• Forge all kinds of bars into WEAPONS to sell - the stock market is across the big bridge from Ember Cradle, in a stone village covered in snow. Or just go to the jeweller's to save time.
  
• Forge any bars AND compressed gems into jewellery - the stock market is far away in Bridgepour
  
• Sell Cloutium and Corestone bars at jeweller's (there are no stock markets), but when you finally automate your mining rig and it starts producing Cloutium and Corestone, SAVE those resources to trade them for T2 and T3 drills in the Icehelm Shrine in the future.
  
• Dump larger items like furniture, walls, doors, pallets, etc. into the Scrap Yard at the city of Bridgepour to convert the item's weight into SCRAP METAL, which can then be forged into bars and sold at the jeweller's... but you don't get much money from it.

The digging can be automated with a drill.
The washing can be automated with a harvester.
The sorting can be automated with a series of Manual Sorter machines, or conveyor splitters.
The smelting can be automated with a smelter; use a funnel above it to prevent spilling.
There is a LOGIC version of the smelter, but it can be complicated to use the thing if you are not familiar with logic circuits.
The gem compressor has a separate handle for manual operation, but using LOGIC it can be automated, too.
The forging with an anvil cannot be automated.
Fishing can SORT OF be automated using fish traps, but you have to manually empty the traps to collect the fish, and they can only hold ONE fish at a time.
Farming can be automated by using T-pipes to drip water, sprinklers, splitters etc.

Since I'm about to teach you how to use your first machines, here is a list of the most important things to remember about machines. Come back and refer to this later if you need to.

• They need a water connection to operate, but the water pressure only really matters for T2 drills and above. Also, conveyor belts completely stop at 0 water pressure.
  
• Longer pipes with lower pressure will cause the conveyors to slow down but T1 drills will always function at at least 89% speed, even at 0 pressure.
  
• Unfiltered water will damage drills, harvesters (and filters), so once you have TWO drills (it's a waste of repair kits with one drill), buy filters and start repairing them.
  
• Several (five) filters are needed to have "pure water" that won't damage the machines, they will snap right on top of straight or T pipe sections.
  
• Water filters will take damage over time, based on the water quality - just like machines do. Filters connected after other filters will take less damage – this applies to stacked filters as well.
  
• Use a wrench (tool bags contain 5) to repair a filter or a machine.
  
• Machines can be linked by conveyor belts, which need to be snapped right onto any of the pipes and require water pressure above 0.
  
• To lift items higher, use a vertical conveyor – first place a "staircase" of elbow pipes, then put the vertical conveyors on top of that.
  
• Conveyors DO NOT take damage from unfiltered water.
  
• Pipe sections DO NOT take damage from unfiltered water.
  
• Any items in motion when you save your game and log out will NOT be in motion when you come back later, they will act as obstacles and will obstruct any NEW items trying to pass through the system (this could be outdated in 2.2).
  
• A drill requires at least one patch of dirt underneath the drill bit in order for it to operate; bedrock is NOT "diggable dirt" so a drill placed on bedrock will not work, but...
  
• You can use the shovel to throw dirt UNDER a drill if it's sitting on bedrock or a manufactured floor (or in midair).
  
• Items placed on the grid (including all your mining machines) are NOT affected by gravity, if you put it three squares up in the air it will STAY three squares up in the air.
  
• The proper order of machines for automating your mine is: Drill(s) -> Harvester -> iron sorting -> gold sorting -> Shard sorting -> Cloutium sorting -> Corestone sorting -> gem polisher -> individual gem sorting.
  
• Sorted metals and shards should then be delivered to a Smelter, which melts them down to make BARS.
  
• Sorted gems should then be routed into Logic Compressors, which smash them into bigger gems.
  
• Compressors do not work on unpolished gems.
  
• Compressor and Smelters can handle one nugget type at once. You need separate Compressors and Smelters.
  
• You can compress a compressed gem as many times as you want, just put it back in the compressor with more gems to increase its weight - just like smelting and re-smelting a metal bar in the smelter.
  
• Pipes getting too long, running out of water pressure to run your machines? The pressure tank can restore the pressure to the level of the original water inlet pipe... but it will consume Shards or Shard Bars in order to do so. It burns shards like fuel so you will have to replace them frequently. Since you can't sell shards anyway, this isn't so bad.
  
• The pressure tank will substitute for a straight pipe section... BUT you cannot attach any hooks to it (filters, conveyors, pressure gauges, etc.)
  
• To open the door on a pressure booster tank, aim at the HANDLE and press RT (click), then grab your shard and press X (E) to drop it into the container, then press RT (click) on the handle again to close it
  
• No shards = no pressure boost, just regular water pressure at that location.
  
• If the pressure tank door is open, no water will pass through it until you close the door.
  
• Creative placement of funnels and wall panels is the only way to try focusing items to dump into a specific location, without them you'll just make a BIG MESS all over the floor
  
• Even with funnels and walls... you're still going to make a big mess sometimes
  
• You can make INTAKE BOOSTERS at Icehelm's ANVIL, these strap directly onto an intake pipe, up to four on each intake, and instantly boost the pressure by a certain pressure rating above normal (or percentages of 100).
  
• Using a pressure tank on a water line that has intake boosters will bring the pressure back up to the same level as the intake pipe INCLUDING the bonus from the boosters.

Once you've earned about 800 coins or so (either by fishing or mining) you can purchase the T1 drill and harvester they are selling at the shop nearby. You only get ONE OF EACH of these, they're basically "used floor models" LOL. IF you want more machines, you'll need to go deeper into the island (into a shrine inside of a volcano) to get them. You'll also want to pick up a bunch of other items, some of which are sold at the tool shop nearby but from now on nearly everything you'll need will be sold at the city of Bridgepour. Time to steal the truck by the Ember Cradle dig site. If you're standing at the jeweler's, turn around and go down the hill, past your first mining site, and across the big bridge.

On the left is a small village with the WEAPONS stock exchange. Keep going up the path.

On the left is a roadside stall with the GOLD BAR stock exchange. At the next intersection, turn right.

The city of Bridgepour has a little of everything: the power/logic shop sells cables and machines for doing math, which you won't need until much later; the JEWELRY stock exchange is there, next to a golden knight statue; there is a shop that sells wooden carts; a store that sells different-color trucks; a scrapyard where you dump any old garbage and turn it into scrap which is worth a few coins; a furniture shop that sells decorative furniture if you want to build a house later; and several shops that sell floors, walls, and roofing products. Wall/roof tiles are a good way to help direct your ore and other items when they come off of your conveyor belts and machines... but that's for later, too.

The two stores you really want to visit now are the conveyor belt store, and the tool shop. You can upgrade your shovel if you want to, but for now the one you got for free will do fine. You will want to buy these items though, some from Bridgepour and some from the shop back by your first mining site.

• Pallets (2)
  
• Rake (1)
  
• Pickaxe (1) - You'll need the T2 after you finish at Ember Cradle, but for now the T1 is fine
  
• T2 Shovel (0) - you will need this when you finish at Ember Cradle, but for now the T1 is fine and you already got one FOR FREE at the beginning of the game
  
• Water Filter Hooks (5) (once you have at least two drills; for now it's better to keep repairing the machines)
  
• Pans (10 total, including the ones you already have)
  
• Stairs (3) these are OPTIONAL, but will help you climb higher to more easily build things
  
• Vertical Conveyor (1)
  
• Straight Conveyor (5)
  
• Centralizer Hook (1)
  
• Gem Polisher Hook (1)
  
• Iron Elbow Pipe (7)
  
• Iron T Pipe (2)
  
• Iron Staright Pipe (11)
  
• "used" T1 Harvester (1) you can only buy ONE for now, to get more you need to make them at the ANVIL shrine... but one will do the job for now
  
• Funnel (1)
  
• Tin Sheet (1)
  
• "used" T1 Drill (1) - you'll need more later, but for now just one will do the job
  
• Repair Bags/Wrenches (several)
  
  Move your wash pan etc. out of the way. Turn off the valve on your water inlet. Place all five water filters in a row on the straight pipes that you setup last time. (In these images I put a flow meter on the first pipe for testing purposes, so my filters are on the NEXT five after that... same thing.)
  At the end of that pipe, put two more straight pipes (seven straight sections total) and then a T pipe to split it into two lines - a left line and a right line. Arrange the rest of the pipes like the pictures below, running both sides parallel in the same direction until you need to add elbows to make the conveyors and harvester fit.
  The RIGHT line will be connecting to the Harvester machine, so this will be a series of four straight pipes and then one elbow leading into the machine.
  The LEFT side will be a little more complex, since you need to run pipes underneath all of your conveyor belts in order to DROP items into the harvester from above it and then CATCH the items that shoot out of the harvester below it, too. Hopefully the pictures make some sense, but go ahead and experiment if the pictures are unclear. The end goal is to have two straight conveyors, the second one with the centralizer on top, then a vertical conveyor leading into another straight conveyor with a dirt shredder on top (as dirt shredder conveyor hooks have been removed from the game, adjust accordingly), that just ENDS at the top edge of the harvester.
  At the chute in front of the harvester, put two straight conveyors leading away from it, the second one should have a gem polisher on top. Then setup a funnel at the end of the line, in front of and below that last conveyor. In front of the conveyor you can setup some Tin Sheets as a sort of shield to keep ore nuggets from flying over the funnel when you turn the system on.
  
  Turn on the water. Now you will dig your hole deeper with your shovel. Just dump your shovel directly onto that first conveyor belt. The conveyor system should take the dirt up, into the shredder, then drop it into the harvester which cleans the dirt to produce ore nuggets. The uncut gems should be polished up by the gem polisher so you never have to use the grinding wheel again. Then the products should pile up in the funnel (which should be sitting on the ground) and you can grab them by hand to sort them out later.
  
  One thing you need to remember is that your filters are PROTECTING ANY MACHINES HOOKED UP TO THE WATER LINES. If any of your five filters breaks, your machines will stop. So always have a repair kit ready to fix your filters when they break. The first filter will break the fastest because it is handling the dirtiest water. Each filter cleans the water by 20%, so the fifth filter in line takes in 80% clean water, and outputs 100% pure clean water... as long as all five filters are working. Anything with a "durability" number that can be damaged by dirty water, will ONLY take damage when it's working and connected to dirty water. The dirtier the water, the faster it will break.
  
  Anytime you have a line of dirt going to a harvester machine, this is how you should set it up, with the exception of conveyor shredder hooks which don't exist anymore. Next I'll walk you through the process of using a drill instead of your shovel. In the next chapter I'll talk about using automatic sorting machines, automatic smelters, and automatic gem compressors so you can AFK your mine and let it make you rich.
  
  As an alternative, if you want to save lots of time and money on buying conveyor splitters and conveyors, you can buy hand sorters and place them in a staircase going down from the harvester like this, using the pickaxe to dig the hole and the shovel or a rake to flatten the shelves for pans:
  You can then add a gem polisher or a conveyor staircase that leads back up, but you can also move to a better dig site and set up a real conveyor mine and replace this poor man's hand sorting device.

Go buy a T1 "used" drill. Position it on the dirt, so the chute will spit out dirt onto the first conveyor belt in the line you just made. If it's easier for now to place it floating in the air, that's fine but you'll need to use your shovel to pile up dirt under the drill bit or else it won't work. To fit the drill in, you'll have to rearrange the corner of your pipes a little bit, but I'm sure you can manage it. Now aim at the red handle on the front of the drill and press RT to turn the drill on. If it's hooked up right AND it's sitting on "diggable dirt" then the light on top of the drill will turn on. If the water is off, or if there is no dirt under the drill bit, then the light will not turn on. Each time the machine runs (once per five seconds) it should spit out a dirt nugget right onto the belt, same spot where you were previously dumping a bucket by hand. The rest of the line should still be setup the same as when you were testing the harvester machine a few minutes ago.

Watch for a minute how the dirt goes through the conveyor system. Also notice how the drill activates about avery 5 seconds. It's a lot slower than your shovel. The solution to this problem is to head to Icehelm and use your iron and cloutium to craft MORE DRILLS. You can hook up several drills in a row on a conveyor line, all feeding into a single harvester. One harvester - in theory at least - can handle dirt from 300 drills or more. But you can certainly make your processing area with multiple harvesters for some reason. Try putting a centralizer not too far upstream from the harvester so dirt doesn't fly off the belt sideways.

** Since update 2.0.6 there are different visual textures for different layers of dirt so it's easier to see how deep you are trying to dig.

** NOT A GLITCH but a new feature: Placing your drill at or above the surface layer will NEVER produce any Cloutium or Corestone ore. You must dig at least one cube deep in order to find any Cloutium and at least one cube below T2 dirt to find Corestone.**

Now you know how to use a drill and harvester together to automatically dig dirt for you, then clean and polish it into ore nuggets. Next we'll go over how to automatically sort your metal and gems after they come out of the harvester.

Shopping list for this chapter:
Several more iron pipes
Hand Sorter (1) - optional, for educational purposes only
Splitter Conveyor (4)
Straight Conveyor (2)
Gem Polisher (1)
Straightener (1)
Smelter (4)
Logic Gem Compressor (1)

Yeah, you'll only need ONE hand sorter machine. Just to show you how it works. These are kind of a pain to use because they're REALLY BULKY, so after I show you how to use this one we'll be switching over to conveyor belt splitters instead. When you get a little more advanced into the game, they can be useful if you want to do some weird things with logic cables I guess, but for just regular sorting they're too oddly shaped to be useful.

The hand sorter uses water, just like the drill and harvester. At the end of the little production line you started in the last chapter, move your funnel and the pile of ore/gems out of the way. Place the sorter machine there instead, so items come out of the harvester, through the gem polisher, and then they drop into the hand sorter. Grab a piece of ore (whichever one you want to separate first) and put it on top of the little shelf on the machine. Hook up the water to the side of the machine (you'll need to buy a few more pipes). Now turn on the water and watch what happens.
The sorter machine has two chutes for items to exit. One side spits out ONLY the item on top of the shelf. The other side spits out EVERYTHING ELSE.

If you want a big crazy puzzle to solve, feel free to arrange one of these hand sorters for each type of item all in a row, connected by belts and pipes. Then you'll see why these things are so annoying to use. Fortunately, there is a BETTER WAY.

Move the auto sorter out of the way now. Go back to the shop and buy AT LEAST ONE (eventually you'll want four of them) splitter conveyor. Hook one up (remember it still has to snap onto a water pipe!) at the end of your belts after the harvester. Put a piece of IRON ORE on top of it. Now turn on the water and watch what happens. Any iron ore that hits the belt will be spit to the RIGHT, everything else will keep moving forward. Yeah, these are MUCH easier to use than the hand sorter machines. ** Update 2.0.6 is introducing alternate versions of conveyor splitters that separate items to the LEFT instead of the right side, just buy whichever version you want to use and build your belts and machines accordingly. **
Put more of those splitter conveyors all in a row, FOUR of them in fact. Put iron on the first one, gold on the second one, cloutium on the third one, and a shard on the fourth one. NOT BARS - JUST ORE. On the right side of each one, put a FUNNEL below it to catch the ores that come off. Below the funnel, put a smelter. Now each ore will drop through the funnel and should land directly into the smelter's cauldron.

At the end of the line, setup your Gem Compressor. Since the only thing that should be on the belts this far down will be gems, because all the other resources got sorted out into smelters, you don't really need any more splitters (but I prefer to separate each type of gem so I usually hook up FOUR more splitters and FOUR compressors instead).
BE CAREFUL when attaching the compressor - the big yellow shaft CANNOT be facing the belts or else all your gems will bounce off and fall on the ground instead of falling into the hopper. Notice one side has water hookup, the other side has a handle. You can pull the handle to manually activate the compressor, but later in the game you can also hook up logic cables to tell it how often you want it to activate AUTOMATICALLY. But anyway... watch out for that big shaft AND the handle. Both can block gems from falling in if you put the compressor facing the wrong direction.

Turn the water back on. Watch how things go. Your ores should each be sent into their own individual smelters, and all your gems should be dumped into the compressor. When it gets a bit full, pull the handle on the compressor. It squashes little gems to form bigger gems - hooray. Then if you aim at the smelter and hit RT you can dump the liquid metal out into the bar mold, producing a bar. If you want a bigger bar, you can put that bar back into the smelter and melt it back down, wait a while longer for more ore to be melted in with it. This works with the "manual" setup of the small forge with crucible on top, or with the regular smelter from Bridgepour's tool shop. It will also work with the LOGIC SMELTER... but that requires you to attach a bunch of data cables and things which we're not ready for just yet.

This setup right here will be your basic money-maker from now on. Automatically sort your items, then when things start to fill up you make bars and big gems. Use gold and gems to build necklaces to sell, but keep your iron and cloutium for use at the ANVIL shrine to make more drills and harvesters later. Until you have enough money to play with logic cables, your only change to this setup will be to GO DEEPER for heavier ore nuggets, and ADD MORE DRILLS before the harvester. From the harvester all the way to the end of the line should be able to handle up to 300 drills (maybe MORE) without adding any more belts or machines. How cool is that? So on your next mining site you can set aside an above-ground piece of land to build your sorting/processing machines... then dig down deep to put all the drills underground.

The only thing left to do here at Ember Cradle is to DIG DEEPER. In a few spots you can go down to about 5 blocks down; put your drill down there. Then use conveyor belts to bring the dirt out of the hole and process it up on the surface with a row of machines just like the one you previously built - in fact you can use the SAME row of processing machines... just add more pipes/belts to carry your ore up there from underground. Also remember to build a solid staircase (either use the concrete blocks or go to Bridgepour and buy a few staircase pieces) so you don't get stuck down in your own hole!!
Let it run for a while, then collect the ore and gems. Use the anvil to forge some weapons and jewelry (necklace and sword are the best) and go sell those to earn some money. Once you have a bunch of money, go to the Icehelm volcano lair. There is a shop there that sells blueprints for drills, harvesters, and intake boosters. You'll want to buy ONE of each blueprint - starting with the T1 drill and T1 iron intake booster. The blueprints are reusable, so buy one of each and just leave it in front of the giant ANVIL shrine to use later, when you have enough iron and cloutium to make the items from the blueprints.
The blueprints cost COINS. Each one has a number on the front, some have two numbers. The number on the grey side is for IRON, the number on the yellow side is for CLOUTIUM. Bring a bar of each required metal that weighs at least as much as the number says. Put the desired blueprint on the pedestal at the bottom of the ANVIL. Climb the stairs next to the ANVIL and drop the metals into the crucible there. ... Then aim at the big lever and hit RT to give it a good yank. BAM - you just made an item. Any extra metal that you tried to use will be sent to the trays at the bottom of the ANVIL for you to recover it.

IF you want to bring any items OUT of Icehelm, there are two conveyors that will bring them up to the loading dock outside. One is next to the ANVIL. The other is down at the bottom of the hole next to the mining area. There is another conveyor OUTSIDE that will send items down to the mining area at the bottom of the hole.

For now, you'll probably want some of those iron inlet boosters. You can strap up to FOUR of these onto an inlet pipe to give it some extra water pressure. Later, if you add a pressure tank into the line farther down, it will restore pressure at that point to the same pressure as the inlet INCLUDING the boosters that are strapped to it.

Also get another drill to set up at Ember Cradle. And maybe one or two more drills after that. The T1 drills are fine for that, since there is no T2 dirt at Ember Cradle anyway. Use those drills (along with more pipes and conveyor belts) to expand your drilling operation and make more money. Once you have Ember Cradle setup to work on its own, let it run for a few hours while you start setting up a new mine at the next dig site. Just remember to go back there and pull the lever on the gem compressor every hour or so, to prevent gems from spilling over the top of the machine.

Now that you're thinking about moving your operation to a new dig site where you can go deeper and install more drills, I want to go over the map of the island; point out the shop and stock market locations as well as NEW MINING LOCATIONS; and give you some tips about buying, selling, and carrying items around the island.

Here is the map, which you can view in the game, with a few additions to show where ALL the stock markets are and what they buy/sell... sorry for the quality but I'm not an artist. If you decide to play with mods, the mod shop appears in Bridgepour, behind the pipe & tool shop. It's in the old castle - in the vanilla game it's just a ruined creepy old castle, but in the mod it will have some slot machines and weird things for sale.


And now for some tips about buying, selling, and hauling items:

• If you try to move a container that has more than about 35 items in it, your frame rate will die and you could crash the game. This is because the game's engine treats it like a container PLUS each item inside it, rather than treating a "full container" as a single object. So it has to compute lighting, shadow, textures, and physics for ALL of the items involved there. Because of this, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND - CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH - limit your pans to around 20 items maximum! This goes for pans full of ore nuggets, buckets and crucibles full of ore nuggets, pallets with too many items stacked on it, the truck with too many items in the back, or a huge ball of resources stuck on a magnet stick. Basically, be careful and try to avoid moving too many items at once.
  
• The truck runs on WATER. It has a hole on top for refilling it like a steam-engine train. You can dump pans of water into it by hand, or build a filling station by sending a pipe up high and then park under it to let the pipe drip into the truck's roof hole while you're not driving it.
  
• Stock markets only buy a specific kind of item, indicated on the sign at the market.
  
• A green arrow on the market's sign means they buy that item for MORE COINS than the jeweler shop.
  
• A red arrow on the market's sign means they buy that item for FEWER COINS than the jeweler shop does.
  
• Stock market rates will CHANGE each day, or as soon as you sell an item to that particular market. If you don't like the price, sleep overnight and it might be different in the morning.
  
• The shops near Ember Cradle and Burnscroft sell fishing gear and basic tools, as well as iron pipes. For most other things, you'll have to travel across the big river to Bridgepour. They have upgraded tools, upgraded pipes, more trucks and wooden carts, logic cables (aka calculators to do math on your machines and conveyor belts), and supplies for building a house or shed out of wood or a "cottage home" theme.
  
• If you want more drills and harvesters, you'll need to travel up the mountain and go into the caverns of Icehelm. You do NOT need to purchase the dig site there just to use the shop and the ANVIL. (Notice I spell it in all caps because this is a gigantic ANVIL, not like your puny one at your mine.)
  
• At Icehelm, buy blueprints for more drills and harvesters for COINS. Bring the blueprint into the main lava cavern, to the ANVIL shrine. Place the blueprint onto the pedestal in front of the ANVIL. Then climb the stairs to the top. Drop the required weight of metals (written on the blueprint) into the crucible there, then pull the big lever to craft your new machine. Note that IRON MACHINES NEED IRON BARS, AND CLOUTIUM MACHINES NEED BOTH IRON AND CLOUTIUM BARS. You don't need "300 separate bars" here like you do when forging a sword you need three separate iron bars... No, here you need a TOTAL WEIGHT equivalent to the number on the blueprint. So buy a scale, and use a saw if you make a bar that is too big. The saw chops a bar (or a stack of coins) in half, so then you have TWO bars instead of one gigantic bar. If the item costs 300 iron and you drop in a bar of 305 iron, you get the extra 5 iron back. Any extra metals will be returned in bar form at the bottom of the ANVIL.
  
• At Icehelm, if you do any shopping or crafting and you want your stuff out of the building, drop your purchases on the conveyor belt near the ANVIL to send them outside to the loading dock. There is also a belt leading up to the loading dock down at the bottom in the mining area, so you can get your ore out to sell it.
  
• Near the Icehelm loading dock is a shop that sells parts for building a house or shed out of stone/brick.

If anything I discuss in this section of the guide is too confusing to follow in text form, I suggest you go on YouTube. There are a lot of good instructional videos on there that discuss how to use the various equipment when linked to conveyors. Just make sure that the video you're watching is pretty recent since the last couple of updates fundamentally changed how the machines work in this game.

When you hit RT to build a conveyor on the grid, you'll notice the hologram has an arrow. That arrow shows the direction that items will travel on that belt. If you put two conveyor sections together, make sure their arrows are facing the same direction or else you'll run into trouble. Also, be sure you build your pipe network (to supply water to the conveyor belts) FIRST. Then snap the conveyor sections onto the pipes. Then snap any other tools onto the conveyor belts. If you build it out of order, some things probably will be unable to connect properly.

If you are trying to send materials UPWARD, use the Vertical Conveyor. However, you should NEVER put a vertical conveyor at the outlet chute of a machine because the ore will bounce off of it. You need a FLAT conveyor section between any machine's output chute and the uphill section.

There (currently) is no downhill vertical conveyor. To move items downward, just build a flat conveyor BELOW the end of the upper level, your items should drop directly down onto the belt below without causing too many problems (items bouncing off into oblivion, or falling on the floor below).

The deeper you put your drill underground, the heavier the ore it will find. Go really deep and it will start pulling BIGGER dirt chunks out of the ground. Once that happens, you'll want to start installing dirt grinders onto the conveyor line.

Definitely put a gem polisher on the belt right after the harvester or after sorting for ores.

If you have a pretty long/bouncy/curvy section of conveyor belt leading to a drop into a machine or funnel or whatever, consider adding a centralizer hook to the belt. This will push items from the edges of the belt into the middle, to give you a more consistent stream of items moving across your conveyor belt system, which leads to better aim when you fire the ore nuggets off into funnels, pans, or other machines.

Personally, I like to make it so that the water in the pipe flows in the same direction as the items on the belt, just to keep things organized so I always know which end to check for leaks. But the water direction does not have to match the conveyor belt direction. Any pipe with water flowing through it will work.

Putting two pipes together with water flowing in opposite directions will create ZERO PRESSURE in the entire pipe system. Zero pressure = no power for the conveyors or machines that are hooked up to that water line. So be careful when connecting pipes from different directions.

Also remember that each section of pipe reduces pressure. Longer pipes = lower pressure = slower speed at the end than at the beginning. Here is how many pipes you can use before water pressures reach certain percentages. As you can see, that cloutium intake is worth its weight in magical wish-granting unicorns. So always try to start your pipelines with an intake one tier higher, even if you can only afford iron pipes for the rest of the water line. Alternatively, adding 4 boosters to the same-tier intake (up to 4 per intake) can improve your pressure. Since using an inlet one tier higher than the pipes can replace those 4 intake boosters, you only really need boosters on (intake-pipes) Corestone-Corestone pipelines.

Iron inlet produces 100 pressure (still good enough for iron drills).
Cloutium inlet produces 250 pressure (saturates iron pipes).
Corestone inlet produces 350 pressure (almost saturates Cloutium pipes).

** Update 2.0.6 is coming soon. Will add different visual textures to different layers of dirt so it's easier to see how deep you are trying to dig. Will (supposedly) fix the water pressure so that machines work faster with more pressure, too. And the distribution and value of the four gems are being changed. **

There are FOUR types of dirt in the game (currently).

• Bedrock is INVINCIBLE, no tools can dig through it.
  
• T1 tools can only dig into T1 dirt, they will make a "Clang" sound with sparks if they hit anything deeper.
  
• T2 tools can dig into T1 and T2 dirt, they will make a "Clang" sound with sparks if they hit anything deeper.
  
• T3 tools can dig into T1, T2 and T3 dirt, they will make a "Clang" sound with sparks if they hit anything deeper.
  
• Remember: you need DIGGABLE DIRT under your drill's "business end" in order for it to work. Don't put the T1 drill any deeper than 8 blocks down or else it can't dig the T2/T3 dirt! The T2 drill can mine through T1 & T2 dirt, but not T3. Similarly with T3 drills.
  
• Shovels will DIG dirt, then you have to unload the shovel somewhere else.
  
• Pickaxes will DESTROY dirt in a slightly larger area than a shovel, leaving no dirt piles behind.
  
• TNT and Nuke will DESTROY dirt in a larger area. They will also damage your machines if they're inside the explosion radius, so be careful with the boom boom. TNT clears an area roughly 1 concrete block in size. Nuke clears an area roughly spherical with a 3-block radius.
  
• Whether you dig by hand or with a drill machine, your ore nuggets will be averaging about 0.5 kg each if you dig on the surface. If you go down to 8 blocks deep (the deepest that T1 equipment can dig) you'll average around 3.4 kg per nugget. At 14 blocks deep (the bottom of T2) the nuggets average around 4.3 kg each. As you can see, ore nuggets get HEAVIER - which means MORE VALUABLE - as you go deeper.
  
• Remember that Gem Polishers only function if placed AFTER the harvester; they don't work on dirt nuggets, only on uncut gems.

I ran a test for about 2 hours with four T1 drills at Ember Cradle - one at 1 block deep and 3 placed at 3 blocks deep. I was testing to see what percentage of the haul each mineral ore is. In two hours I made almost 140,000 coins, and this was the distribution of ores:


As you can see, you'll find mostly iron and gold, a decent amount of shards, and about 4.5% of the ore will be "normal" gems. Only 1/8 of a percent will be onyx, and 3/4 of a percent will be cloutium. Since cloutium is so rare, it's usually better to save it up to craft T2 drills and harvesters instead of selling it at the shop.

But hey, 140,000 coins in just two hours running just four T1 drills (that would be around 35,000 if I only had one drill). Imagine how much you'll earn if you build BIGGER drill setups, and use the T2 equipment to go DEEPER - which increases the weight of your ore nuggets by a factor of about 8. To do that though, you'll have to move out of Ember Cradle and set up your operation at a bigger & deeper dig site. You could move all your stuff from Ember Cradle to get you started over there, or you could leave Ember Cradle setup so you can come back and grab some quick resources here if you need more cash, more gems, or more metals to craft more T2 equipment. I prefer to leave my first automatic mine running here, I'll even come back later and add in a couple more drills, and this will be like my "emergency supply stash." But you can and should play your game the way you like to.

Ember Cradle is the plot we've been mining this whole time so far. It is VERY small. It has two tiny mining areas, one on each side of the river. The river is your water source and you won't need to bring the water very far or very deep from the river so you shouldn't need any inlet boosters, pressure chambers, or cloutium pipes here. Iron pipes are fine, but once you make some money I do recommend swapping out your iron inlets to cloutium inlets at least. You can only dig down a few grid squares deep, so you won't get big rewards here, but it's enough to get you started in the game. And the dig site is FREE, you own it from the start of the game. It has "T1 Dirt" on top of bedrock so you will NEVER need any T2 tools here. Honestly you'll make about equal money from fishing here compared to mining because the mine is so small and so shallow. But you will earn enough to buy some supplies and learn all of the basic functions of the game. If you took your time and followed the entire tutorial in this guide, you might even have enough money to buy ALL the other dig sites now (22,970)... but after spending all that money you'll be broke so you'll then need to earn more to buy pipes and belts and such for each new dig site.

Now that you know the basics of how the game works, you can expand your operation by purchasing NEW mining sites and build bigger/better mines there! You didn't really think the tiny beginner hole was the whole game, did you? LOL.

Mildew Aquifer can be bought for 970 coins. It is actually split into three regions - note the diagram sitting in front of the sign at the front of the area. The left side only goes down a few blocks, similar to Ember Cradle but slightly deeper. The middle goes down to T2 dirt, so you'll need to go up to Icehelm and bring back T2 machines to dig that area. The right side can go EVEN DEEPER, T3 down to bedrock. When you get to the bottom of each section you hit WATER instead of bedrock, so be careful since if you dig too deep your feet will get wet. You just want to expose enough water to place your inlet pipes, leave the rest of the bottom as dirt so you have someplace to put your drills and such. If you build carefully, you shouldn't need any Cloutium pipes for this site since there is water everywhere down in the hole. The walls here are VERY STEEP, almost completely vertical. So build yourself a good staircase as you dig, so you don't get stuck down in your own hole. My advice: it's easier to dig down to T2 and T3 using nukes... but nukes are pretty expensive so the T2 common pickaxe is the cheaper option here. Once you hit the T2 section, you'll also need to run up to Icehelm and use THE ANVIL to craft yourself some T2 drills and T2 harvesters because T1 equipment just can't handle the T2 dirt. Remember - the deeper you go, the bigger your rewards. So once you get down to the bottom of T1 (8 blocks deep) you'll be making better money from mining than from fishing. Once you get to the bottom of T2 (14 blocks deep) that's where the real money can be made... until you get T3 with your tokens.

Dreck Quarry will cost you 1200 coins. The left side of the area has a gentle slope down the side of the mountain that continues underground. The right side is the deepest part. The only water source is a small puddle at the back of the left side, so a Cloutium Intake Pipe will be the best option for this site. So I recommend setting up your processing equipment on the surface on the left side, then dig down the right side and put your drills underground there. The T2 area here is pretty small because of the way the bedrock slopes into it from the left, but there is plenty of T1 dirt to work with.

South Hope costs 6600 coins. The ocean will be your water source, you can only build pipe inlets (and fish traps, or anything else that you might want to put in/on the water) on the very edge of the sea, you can't build anything out in open water in this game. The site is fairly large and DEEP, and there are no bedrock walls within the dig site, the only bedrock is on the outer edges and below the T3 dirt at the bottom. If you are SMART about how you dig here, you can dig all the way down to the bottom of T2 and setup some T2 drill rigs, then dig a SECOND LAYER into the top of T1 dirt and setup another floor of T2 equipment there... then you can setup TWO MORE T1 drill lines above that, and MORE T1 drills (along with your smelters and compressors) on the surface. Just how much of an entrepreneur are you? Since the ocean is a little distance away from the hole here, you should probably use a Cloutium inlet pipe for MORE WATER PRESSURE, and then maybe go to Icehelm and craft some intake boosters and strap four of them to each of your inlet pipes. ...

... Or, you could just say "screw the T1 garbage" and drop nukes around the area to "kaboom" your way down to T2 faster. They are sold at the Logic Shop in Bridgepour. When using nukes, it may be tempting to drop 40 bombs into a single hole just to see what happens... hehehehe... but those nukes are pretty expensive and it's more efficient to spread them out by about 4 or 5 blocks between them, then detonate them all with a single detonator - this will explode a larger area with the same number of nuclear bombs (see that, I CAN spell it; I can pronounce it, too).

Snowrune Falls costs 7000 coins. The only water source is a partially frozen pond at the front of the area, if you're going to the bottom of the hole the iron inlet/pipes won't carry enough pressure to get the job done because it's so far AND so deep from the pond to your mine. So you'll either need cloutium pipes or else a bunch of the shard chambers to refresh the pressure if you insist on using iron pipes here. Maybe even head up to Icehelm and craft some cloutium boosters, then strap four of them onto each of your pipe inlets. Aside from that, it's actually similar to working in South Hope.

Icehelm dig site costs 7200 coins. It's at the bottom of the ANVIL volcano area. Instead of digging DOWNWARD, you dig SIDEWAYS through the mountain. T1 dirt goes BACK 8 blocks, then you hit T2 from 9-14 blocks back, then T3 behind that. Eventually you will hit bedrock if you nuke far enough. Your only water source is a tiny puddle in front of the dig site, so you can't fit very many inlet pipes in here, basically you'll need a lot of T-pipes to split off for each line of machines and belts. My advice: build a WOODEN STAIR first, to go from the ground up one block. Then start digging into the wall at that level by using your pickaxe not nukes, so you leave the bottom block of dirt INTACT as a diggable floor for your drills to work on. Diggable dirt extends high enough that you can probably build a SECOND LAYER of drills and processing equipment above the first layer, if you are smart and use the pickaxe carefully to leave a shelf of dirt above your "ground-level" drills. I haven't tried to find a ceiling here yet, but you might even be able to get a THIRD LAYER of drills above the second layer!! Feel free to try if you're ambitiously greedy or if you just love how gold shines in the soft light of the hot lava puddles. This place will make you richer than the king. LOL.

At some point, you'll get tired of manually clicking the levers to dump molten metal into a bar. Well, you can use LOGIC (a.k.a. data cables and math programming) to automate your system EVEN MORE! You'll start by visiting the Logic Shop in Bridgepour. They sell all the things you need.

Item Counter Gate - put it on a belt, it counts HOW MANY items go through it. Can also be used hovering in midair where items fly off the end of a belt. The OUTPUT is on the side of the unit, this sends the number of items through the cable and it ONLY sends a signal when the number CHANGES. The cable port on top of the unit is a RESET line. You can connect a manual button to reset it to "zero" by hand, or connect more logic cables to have a mathematical trigger to tell it when to reset automatically.

Weight Scanner - similar to the item counter, but it measures WEIGHT instead of number of items. Useful for triggering an auto-smelter to produce a bar of a certain size (such as a 300 kg Cloutium Bar). Again, the port on the side sends the weight signal out, whenever the weight value changes. The port on top is the reset.

Button - a manual trigger, sends a signal (equal to a value of 1) whenever you hit the button.

Switch - a manual trigger, sends a signal (equal to a value of 1) when you pull the lever DOWN, sends a signal (equal to a value of 0) when you pull the lever UP. In most cases, zero (up) will be OFF and one (down) will be ON.

Logic Valve - turn the flow ON or OFF depending if it receives a signal of 0 or a positive number, works on either water pipes or data cables.

Cork - plug up the end of a cable if you need to, just like it does with water pipes.

Delay - available in 1 second or 10 second versions. HOLDS the signal for the indicated time before sending it further up the cable. Basically it makes the system WAIT after your trigger fires.

Durability Scanner - point it at a filter or machine that "can be damaged" and it reads the durability of the item. It sends a signal (value equal to the durability) whenever the value changes. When building an "auto-repair circuit" BUILD THIS AS THE FINAL STEP or it will not work properly.

Spanner Thrower - load it up with wrenches (the screen on the unit shows how much ammo is left inside) and it throws a wrench forward whenever it receives a signal greater than zero. Useful for automatically hitting a damaged machine with a repair wrench, when paired with a durability scanner and a keypad.

Keypad - enter any number, then hit the green button to confirm. Sends a signal with a value equal to whatever you entered. Hit the red button to cancel and zero it out.

Diode - only allows signal to move in the direction of the arrow. Useful for blocking signals from moving "backwards" if you connect several cables together. Think of it like a "gatekeeper" for your signals.

Flip-Flop - sends out a signal of 1 or 0 every time the signal that it is receiving changes. It alternates between one and zero for the output, regardless of what the input value is. Useful if you need to turn something on, then off, then on, then off, then on, then off...

Switch - If the input value is zero, it outputs a signal of 1. If the input value is NOT zero, it outputs a signal of zero. Useful for changing what would normally be an "activate trigger" signal into a "turn it off" signal, and vice versa.

Metronome - sends a signal of 1 every second, useful for keeping track of time elapsed

Light - input any value up to 9 digits to change the color of the light. No signal = turn the lights off. Useful for indicating if a cable has an active signal or not.

Destroyer - similar to the gem compressor or auto-smelter... except instead of MAKING items it DESTROYS them. Basically it's your garbage bin.

Comparative Math - there are a few versions of this T cable. ADD two data cable signals together, SUBTRACT data cable A from cable B signal, check to see if A and B are EQUAL (outputs 1 if they are equal, zero if not), and check to see if A > B (output 1 if so, 0 if not). The two items you are comparing must be connected on the parallel ends, and IT DOES MATTER WHICH CABLE IS ON THE A SIDE AND WHICH IS ON THE B SIDE. The output is the center of the T.

I think that's everything... I may have forgotten something. If you know how to do basic math and programming with computer logic, then you'll do pretty well playing with the data cables here. If you've never done any programming, maybe you'll learn something from this - or maybe you'll just decide not to mess with the data cables at all. It's your game, play it your way.

Here is a "floorplan" as seen from above, showing how the belts should connect a series of auto smelters and a gem compressor. The bottom half of the diagram shows how to count EACH different bar separately. You can replace those item counters with weight scanners if you're more interested in how much total weight has been collected for each metal. Or, if you don't care about keeping track of how much you've collected, you can rearrange this so that ALL your products fall onto a single belt to be carried away to wherever you want to collect them. (And remember the gem compressor currently DOES NOT dump your big gems out so you still need to pull them out by hand - but then they can go on the conveyor system with the metal bars if you want them all to end up in the same place.)
Bear in mind this is only an example, to show the flow of items through your processing system. Feel free to design your own.

And this one shows a couple of circuit diagrams. The one on top is for an "auto-repair" system. Just remember to come back every hour or so and reload wrenches into the spanner thrower. The circuit on the bottom shows how to design a system using data cables that will automatically trigger ALL of your processing machines (repeat this design for each machine, then connect their data cables at the green circle locations), then reset the counters on the scanners that trigger them.
Again, this is only an example, and I haven't had time to build the whole thing and physically test it yet so there may be a bug or two in there. But in this circuit, pay attention to the DIODES. Not all of them are necessary, some of them are just to help me keep things organized mentally so I can see what direction the signal should be going. But most of the diodes here are NECESSARY to prevent back-flow of data moving in the wrong direction, leading to accidentally resetting counters and activating machines, or worse - accidentally shutting off the water.

The general idea of the circuit there is:
1. Get the desired weight or number of ore into the machine...
2. Turn OFF the water to the conveyor belts...
3. Wait 1 second to make sure the belts are clear...
4. Run the machine...
5. Wait 3 seconds to make sure the machine is finished...
6. Reset the counter on the weight/quantity scanner...
7. Wait 1 second to make sure the counter is properly reset first...
8. Turn ON the water to the conveyor belts...
9. Do NOTHING until the required weight or number of items is in the machine again...
10. Restart the whole cycle at step 2.

If you setup a single circuit like this for each machine, but connect them all to the same water line for the conveyor belts, then any machine can shut down the belts while it operates, then turn the water back on when it's finished. You can even have multiple machines trigger at the same time and it shouldn't be a problem because we're combining all the water valve signals using A+B comparators and then a 0/1 validator. If anything in this circuit is setup wrong, the water valve section is likely the culprit - because as I mentioned I have not yet had time to test this circuit for troubleshooting. I'll try to come back here and edit this once I've done that.

Having each machine attached to a separate water valve won't really do any good because as long as items are still coming down the belts they will BOUNCE OFF of the machine's lid while it is working. This can lead to a gigantic mess with ore scattered all over your mine. So it's best to just shut down the belts any time a machine is running. This is why I recommend having one water line that connects to your machinery, and a separate line just for the conveyor belts. They can come from the same intake pipe, but they must have separate valves and separate pipelines after that - one for the belts and one for the machines.

Yes there are mods. They are on the Steam Workshop, all of them function with game version 2.0.5. You WILL NEED these three mods, even if you don't plan to utilize all of their features, because most of the other mods depend on them:
HML (mod loader)
TheRFCModShop (shop for modded items and a small casino)
Hydrotility++ (adds the ability to freeze/unfreeze time, plus a menu for selecting various options once you download OTHER mods that require this one)

There are two mods that I HIGHLY recommend. One increases the number of pipes. The other increases the number of data cables. Both of these let you have different types of intersections on your pipes and cables, which allows you more options when designing your processing equipment. Very cool. Both of these really should have been included in the base game.

There is one that lets you build more pickaxes, too. The pickaxe workbench is down in the shop inside of Icehelm. It works like your anvil: put your previous pickaxe (starting with the dull one) on the table. Then drop whatever other resources it asks for onto the table. Then hit the table with your blacksmith hammer. BE CAREFUL THOUGH; some of these pickaxes dig bigger areas than a nuclear bomb. The final one in particular will remove basically ALL the diggable dirt from a whole mining site. Also, the pickaxes CANNOT go into a tool rack or they will crash the game.

There is another mod that just removes durability from the game. No more need for water filters or repair wrenches. If you want "easy mode" you can get this one.

There aren't many mods yet, there used to be more for version 1.7 but the 2.0 update killed them all, they need to be rewritten to work with the new game version. Several of the old mods are still being re-developed for 2.0 though; and new ones are still in development as well. Who knows what sort of craziness will be in the Workshop two months from now?? Check back every now and then and see for yourself.