Rimworld Unlocking The Secrets Of The Automatic Drilling Rig

Getting The Automatic Drilling Rig Working In Rimworld

The automatic drilling rig is one of those late-game conveniences that most players stumble into rather than plan for. You need stone for building, plaster for finishing walls, and if you are hauling it by hand like I did for my first ten Colonists, you will understand why people look into automating the process. The base game does not give you a dedicated drill rig. What exists is a combination of work tasks, automation via mechanisms, and a mod that actually solves the problem cleanly. If you are playing unmodded, you build a stone cutting machine and assign a colonist to operate it. That colonist stands there and processes stone blocks into cut stone at a rate of about one every few seconds, depending on their mining skill. There is no auto-feed, no auto-output. You have to manually stockpile the raw stone near it, and you have to manually pull the output when the stockpile fills. It is functional but tedious. For actual automation, the approach I settled on involved stacking a power switch, an auto-butcher-style relay, and a few storage units. You route the stone through a chain. The mechanic pulls stone from a near-adjacent stockpile, feeds the cutter, and the output goes into a different bin. The whole thing takes about ten minutes to set up properly and reduces the staffing cost from one dedicated colonist to zero.

I ran into a specific issue early on that took me a while to diagnose. The automatic cutter will queue work even when the output bin is full. This means it will pause mid-cycle and block your colonist. I spent an afternoon confused about why the rig kept stalling. The fix was simple but not obvious: put a pressure switch on the output bin with a high threshold, wire it to kill power to the machine when the bin exceeds roughly ninety percent capacity. That stops the queue from building and eliminates the stall entirely. The mechanical version also has a throughput ceiling. A single stone cutting machine can produce about two hundred cut stone per day under optimal conditions with a skilled operator. If you need more than that, you need a second machine. The power draw is negligible since these run on nothing or a small generator if you add a fabricator attachment, but space becomes the constraint faster than energy does. Each machine plus its surrounding buffer stockpiles needs about a twelve-by-twelve foot area to function without traffic jams. Now, if you are open to mods, Automatic Drilling Rig by various authors on the Steam Workshop is the route most people end up choosing. The mod adds a proper machine that auto-feeds and auto-stocks. You place it, assign a range, and it pulls raw stone from nearby stockpiles and deposits cut stone into another. Setup time drops from ten minutes to about thirty seconds. Throughput scales better too because the mod handles queue management internally.

The main downside to the mod route is that it depends on HugsLib and sometimes conflicts with other automation mods if they both try to manage the same stockpile logic. I had one save where two automation mods fought over the same output bin and caused a resource loop that froze the game for several ticks. The workaround was removing one of them, which in my case meant sticking with the manual relay setup anyway since it was already running fine. Another thing the mod does not always handle cleanly is altitude changes. If your stone source is on a higher floor and the rig is below, the colonist or machine will need stairs or a ramp path. I built my first automated rig into a hillside and watched it fail to process anything for three in-game days because the pathfinding couldn't bridge the gap. Dropping the stone stockpile to the same level solved it immediately. For players who want a middle ground, there is also a manual variant where you use a mining drill concept from community blueprints. These are not official mechanics. They are player-built contraptions using doors, traps, and moving platforms to simulate a continuous feed. They are technically impressive but fragile. A single pawn getting stuck behind a door breaks the whole chain.

The real question is whether automation is worth it at all. If your colony produces less than two hundred cut stone per month, you do not need any of this. Assign one miner and let them balance stone cutting with actual mining duties. The system becomes necessary once you start expanding into multi-floor bases or require large quantities of plaster for medical rooms. Before that point, the manual approach is sufficient and less prone to breaking during updates. If you do go the mod route, search the Workshop for "Automatic Drilling Rig Rimworld" and check the update date. Several versions were broken after the 1.5 patch. I recommend the one by .Byron or the fork that specifically mentions 1.5 compatibility. Version compatibility matters more here than download count because these types of mods touch core game logic and a stale version can corrupt a save mid-operation. There is no way around the fact that stone processing in Rimworld is inherently slow compared to other resource chains. Metal smelting has auto-forges. Wood goes through sawyers. Stone just sits there waiting. That mismatch is what drives people toward automation in the first place. Understanding the limitation upfront saves time. Build the rig when you actually need the volume, not before.