Colossal Quarry

A multiblock quarry that really mines. Build a 5×5×5 Quarry Rig, press Start, and a drill gantry rolls out over the ground behind it and digs the whole area, layer by layer, down to bedrock. It breaks real blocks. It never makes ores out of thin air.

Upgrade it for speed, Fortune, Silk Touch, bigger holes, ores-only mining or junk voiding. Hook up any pipe or cable mod, or just put a Coal Generator on top. It works in a pack with no other tech mods.

Features

• A real multiblock. A hollow 5×5×5 box of Quarry Casing with a Controller and an Energy Port in the walls. It forms by itself when it's complete. If something's wrong, right-click the Controller: chat tells you what ("Missing casing, 3 left", "Inside must be empty") and red particles mark the spot.
• Breaking a part only unforms the rig. Nothing else breaks, nothing is lost.
• A moving drill gantry. When you press Start, the rig builds a yellow-and-black frame around the dig area. A bridge, carriage, shaft and spinning drill head then move over the hole, snaking across each layer. The gantry is drawn by the game, not made of blocks, so it costs nothing on the server.
• You pick where it digs. The hole is on the side of the rig away from the Controller. Set the width and length (3 up to 16, or up to 128 with Size upgrades) and a "Stop at Y" depth.
• It never deletes your items. Drops go into a 27-slot buffer. When it's full, the rig pauses and carries on by itself when there's room. Only the Void upgrade throws things away, and only junk.
• A freshly built rig is stopped. Nothing digs until you press Start, so no surprise craters.
• Its own Coal Generator (60 FE/t from anything that burns in a furnace), so it works without a power mod.

Upgrades

Six upgrade slots. One of each type; a higher level replaces the lower one. Fortune and Silk Touch can't go in together.

Fortune and Silk Touch work on every ore from every mod. The rig runs each block's own loot table as if it was mined with a Netherite Pickaxe carrying the rig's enchantment, so no compat code is needed.

Numbers

Example: Speed III + Fortune III + Efficiency III = 400 FE per block × 32 per second = 640 FE/t.

A 16×16 hole from the surface to bedrock takes about 2 h 15 min at base speed, or about 17 minutes with Speed III.

Ports

Ports go in the middle 3×3 of any face of the rig. They use the loader's standard energy and item connections, so cables, pipes, hoppers and storage mods connect with no special compat.

• Energy Port: takes FE in from any cable or generator.
• Item Port: gives out the buffer's items. Pipes or a hopper underneath can pull from it, or sneak + right-click to switch it to Push mode, where it fills a chest next to it by itself.
• Redstone Port: run always / only when powered / only when not powered, and a comparator shows how full the buffer is.

Made for servers and modpacks

• Respects land claims. Before each block it fires the normal "a player broke this" event as the rig owner, so claim mods can stop it. Protected blocks are skipped and counted.
• Never mines bedrock and other unbreakable blocks, chests, spawners and other block entities, or anything in the colossalquarry:never_mine tag.
• Light on the server: at most 4 blocks broken per tick per rig; a stopped, finished, unpowered or full rig does no work at all; it chunk-loads only its own chunk and the drill's chunk (at most 4), and releases them when it stops. Chunk loading can be turned off.
• Survives restarts. It picks up exactly where it left off.
• Every number is in the server config, and every upgrade's numbers come from data. On NeoForge that is a data map (colossalquarry:quarry_upgrade); on Forge it is the same JSON file, read by the mod (item IDs only; item tags there are NeoForge-only). Packs can change them or add new upgrade items with a datapack or KubeJS. The Ore Sieve and Void lists are item/block tags.

Recipes

Played on its own, everything is crafted from vanilla items. The rig costs about 100 Iron Ingots, 100 Stone Bricks, around 45 Redstone and 4 Diamonds: mid-game, on purpose. Fortune and Silk Touch upgrades need the real enchanted book.

On NeoForge, the recipes change when Mekanism and/or Create are installed:

Only one set is active, so JEI and EMI only show the recipes that work. Pack makers can force a set in config/colossalquarry-common.toml (recipeSet), and datapacks or KubeJS can still change any single recipe.

On Forge, it's always the Vanilla recipes. Create and Mekanism have no Forge 1.21.1 versions, so the Forge file has no Mekanism or Create recipe sets and its config only offers Vanilla.

Requirements

Install it on both the client and the server.

FAQ

Does it generate ores? No. It only mines what's really in the ground.

Where does it dig? Behind the rig: on the side away from the Controller. Put the Controller on the face that points away from where you want the hole.

Why isn't it digging? Look at the status line in the Controller screen: "Stopped", "No power", "Output full", "Frame damaged" or "Stopped by redstone" tell you what it's waiting for.

Can I use it in my modpack? Yes.

Fabric? Not planned.