A Drone Miner is a ship module that does the mining loop for you. Instead of holding the beam yourself, you deploy an autonomous drone that flies out to a nearby asteroid, mines it, and hauls the ore back to your ship's ore hold while you do something else.
The drone is a real little ship — a lit copper craft — that everyone near the belt can see flying between the rocks. It's an AFK convenience, not a speed-up: a single drone mines slower than holding the beam by hand. The value is that it runs while your hands are free.
The module installs on a ship as a drone bay (a Lodestone block — the "Mining Drone Bay"). Each bay you install is its own unit: one bay deploys one drone, and the bay's tier sets that drone's reach and mining rate.
A deployed drone:
The bay block shows its live status as a floating label — deploying, in transit, mining (with a running ore count), or idle. If you right-click and there's no belt in range, you get a chat message telling you to fly closer.
There are three drone-bay tiers. Higher tiers reach farther and mine faster (shorter pull interval and more ore per pull):
| Tier | Module | Range | Pull interval | Ore per pull |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mk I | module.drone_miner_t1 | 350 blocks | 6 s | 1 |
| Mk II | module.drone_miner_t2 | 600 blocks | 5 s | 2 |
| Mk III | module.drone_miner_t3 | 900 blocks | 4 s | 3 |
Range is the operating radius around your parked ship: a Mk I sweeps a local cluster of a few rocks, a Mk III covers a whole belt. Drone transit speed is 45 blocks/sec across all tiers.
The ore a drone pulls is whatever the rock yields in that zone, so the same zone gates apply as hand mining — deeper zones mean better ore and a higher yield multiplier (see Mining).
How many drones you can run at once depends on the hull class flying them. Big capital hulls can't run any — drone mining is a small/medium-ship activity:
| Hull class | Max drones |
|---|---|
| Frigate | 4 |
| Destroyer | 4 |
| Cruiser | 8 |
| Battlecruiser | 0 |
| Colossal | 0 |
The drone bay module itself installs on any ship (minimum hull class Frigate), but a Battlecruiser or Colossal won't deploy from it. Run your mining on a Cruiser-or-smaller and bring the capital for something else.
Drone bays are both craftable and vendor-bought.
Buy from a module vendor for credits (the convenience price):
Craft at a fabricator if you'd rather build it from refined materials. The recipes climb the fabrication web — refined metal plus components like circuit boards and magnetic coils:
manufacture.drone_miner_t1) — refined titanium + structural plating + a circuit board + a magnetic coil (60 s)manufacture.drone_miner_t3) — refined platinum + reinforced composite + circuit boards + magnetic coils + focusing lenses (180 s)See Fabrication for the full component tree, and the Crafting wiki for the bootstrap chain on any input.
A drone loop is AFK by definition — you're parked and not watching the screen. That's fine in safe zones, but doing it in pirate or PvP space is risky: pirates will close on your parked ship, and in NULL (Wild Drift) another player can simply kill you while you're tabbed out. The deeper-zone payoff is real, but if you're going to walk away, do it where the lanes are patrolled, or keep one eye on the screen.