Automated Mining and Manufacturing

Like I said. From what I can imagine, it would be mainly used to effectively colonize and control territory and generate enough resources (both in pixels and in energy) to fund and fuel bigger projects. There could scale from smaller versions which are designed to have minimal individual impact on the ecology of a planet (used most likely to power or fund a small outpost or a small project), to incredibly invasive versions that produce huge energy or pixel dividends, but require maintenance or produce a substantially larger environmental footprint.

A strong resource infrastructure is necessary to grow and maintain a society - and unless Starbound is in keeping with Terraria by limiting your development to only a handful of NPCs and an Andromeda-class ship or space station, we'll be creating and managing a whole lot more than just ourselves.

 

I honestly don't want to see automatic mining in the game. It would ruin a lot of the gathering feel. Imagine Minecraft or Terraia where you don't have to go mining. I think it would just be way too OP and be borderline game-breaking.

 

I swear half the people aren't even reading the thread before they comment. This concept of automated resource gathering is totally separate from personal gathering. The two would be mutually exclusive. It has nothing to do with block gathering and doesn't detract from the personal experience at all.

 

I've thought/read for a while about this and I think there is a way to do automatic mining without it being game breaking. As stated on the second page there was already some reference to a possible bot to mine in one direction kinda like how Industrial Craft mod for Minecraft worked. These bots weren't only used for mining which adds a nice twist to it and of course there should be some sort of limitation or else you'll have some guy with 100 bots just completely destroying worlds lol.

That said I know most people here have stepped away from the OP which was about core mining and such. Remember you can't go to the core of a planet due to some type of boundary such as lava so setting up a mining rig there would need to be automated. To answer this question I would have to ask a few more. Everything has a drawback, or should, a choice that is not one sided. Ex. A monster appears... your options are; evade it but it might kill you, kill it but then you might not see it for a while due to the random monster generator, capture it but then you wouldn't get the loot it drops, etc. This brings me to the point that if we were to automate a machine to mine the core there should be some drawbacks such as but not limited to a huge eruption, gravity change (the center is the most dense), planetary destruction, etc. It would be poor gaming design to have a machine that constantly gives you something for free because you could go on vacation for a week while afk.

Finally I'd like to draw attention to the modding community and what they've done or Minecraft. Industrialization has become very popular and so if the modding community becomes something in this game I'm sure that the OP will see at least some form of his vision. Such as currently Stars have no player interaction, other than providing light, from what I've read. There was a thread that suggested the ability end game to gather resources from the sun however gathering too much would result in a super nova and as a result the destruction of the solar system.

 

why not make a way to make your space center be a kind of giant miner and make a way to make giant lasers that can use solar power or coal or any type of fuel to make a giant deadly laser that mines planets and with a way to take it with you by adding a type of drone block that allows it to follow you to worlds