Best way to get coal?

You can replant trees, and you usually get more than one sapling per tree, so gather up a bunch of the same type of tree, and make a huge tree farm. They grow really fast, so you should have a bunch of coal in no time at all. It's completely sustainable, in case you are for some reason worried about that in a universe with an infinite amount of trees to chop down.

 

Here are two useful tips:

1. This is the most useful! Install the Fully Customizable Ship mod and break down one tree. Now, you get around two seeds. Make a little farm on your ship and plant the two seeds. Cut the trees, plant more seeds. Cut those trees, plant more seeds. And do it all again. Within minutes, you'll have a giant portable wood farm. Smelt the wood into coal. Trust me, it works! I usually get 5000 wood which is equivalent to 500 coal every time I cut my trees down.

2. Asteroid fields! All the asteroids are small and see through, so you can see if there are ores in it. We all know that there are more ores on asteroid fields, and coal isn't an exception.

 

Best way to get coal is find a grassland biome, and cover the entire surface with seeds, and then harvest and replant them for wood. Then smelt the wood for easy coal (charcoal).

 

You guys might want to check the date on this post. It's from the December patch when coal was really really rare, and saplings weren't in yet.

They've since changed coal generation to be much more common.

I doubt OP (or most people) still require help with this.

 

1)Get 50+ tree 'seeds'
2)Get 100+ dirt
3) Just next to your beam down area on a planet you plan to mine in for ore, place a huge flat platform of dirt.
4)Plant every seed side by side on the platform
5)Go mine.
6)When you are done mining or just 5-10 min later, come back and chop down the very dense forest.
7) repeat.

1000 wood = 100 coal.
50 trees can produce around 2500 wood.

This method takes wayyyyy less time than mining as I originally tried mining for coal, but now I have more coal than I care to deal with.

 

My planet is blocked with trees now. Trees have replaced the wildlife as the dominant species. All that coal tho.....

 

Am I the only one who doesn't have difficulty amassing coal? My engines are usually full, with 1/4 to a stack of coal in reserve. And I'm only up to durasteel stuff...

 

Krylo just explained why no one has difficulty amassing coal any more.... look up 3 or so posts....

 

Been saying this all day long. Desert planets are full of win in terms of minerals and easymode method of getting them.

 

Dig deep, ore concentrations increase the deeper down you go. If you're really desperate for coal, smelt the wood into charcoal but I would make sure the type of trees you cut down also spawn saplings (some of them don't) so that you can replace the cut trees. If you manage it right, you may have an unlimited supply of fuel on your home world.

I sure hope the devs would make trees (and other plants) spontaneously grow on planets that you have explored before provided that you left some trees standing.

 

Also not all wood can be turned into charcoal, I think it is only the metal coated/rainbow wood though.

 

you didnt factor smelt time. grow + smelt = longer than mining deserts or gravel.

 

You can use more than one furnace to smelt the stuff faster, though. Get like 10 going and it cuts down the time significantly.

 

i also forgot to factor in the chopping ;D

 

I did factor that in. (I didn't factor that in, I'm lying)
Smelt time is nominal if you have multiple furnaces. You can do other things while waiting for trees to grow for 5 minuites, and smelt for 30 seconds. You cant do anything else while chopping down trees (about 3 min). If you can get 500 coal mining aggregate, at a rate faster than mining trees, I would love to learn how its done (not sarcasm, I actually would. Arguing semantics, it's part of the fun of the game...)

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Perhaps next year Santa will be the best source of coal....Or if you kill Kristen Stewart mine it from her heart.

 

I would also like to know about how to get such huge amounts of coal from mining.

And while I don't usually argue about celebrities, I feel Kristen Stewart really doesn't deserve the bad rap she has. The entire point of the character she played was for it to be a soulless and emotionless template for people to project themselves on, not an actual fleshed out character.

 

Wellll.... she was just an easy target so I took the shot, and I'm not clever enough to drop a name like Maggie Thatcher or Michel Martelly.

 

I suppose necroing threads puts you on Santa's naughty list? Coal for days.

 

I drill the damn things, lol I dont think its any faster though, or at least not enough to really matter.

 

keeping the mining to dirt/sand (requires 1 "pulse" of diamond drill to mine an oreless block) in addition to this, and you'll be swimming in it. you'll want to make sure the planet you are mining is tier 3-4 (before plutonium) as the more minerals there are available to spawn, the less chance any given cluster will be coal.

but yea, get to the cavern layer, and keep horizontal, mining out all the large pockets of fine sand and gravel.

as an added bonus, you get lots of other ore, useful for smelting into pixels or whatever else you desire.

mining a tree takes at least as long as mining out a surface cobblestone. cobblestone is like 5-6 diamond drill pulses. lets average 1 tree to 1 coal. 50 trees = 250 - 300 diamond drill pulses. i bet i can find 50 coal in less time than it takes to chop and smelt 50 trees, let alone plant and grow them.