Portable Miner

"We don’t want you to harm yourself mining for ore bare-handed"

- Caterina Parks's assistant Steve

The Portable miner is a small, portable version of a normal Miner, and is the first mining tool available to the engineer (aside from their hands). It is available in the Workshop after completing the tier 0 milestone "Hub Upgrade 1: Storage & Power". It requires no fuel, but has no conveyor belt connections and can only hold 100 pieces of ore. It mines at a speed of 20/40/80 items per minute on inpure/normal/pure ore.

Usage
Open your inventory and drag the portable miner into your hand slot. Then find a resource node such as an Iron Ore deposit. At any location on the deposit where you have the prompt to pick up ore, left-click to drop the miner. It will play a deploy animation, but will begin mining as soon as it leaves your hand at a rate based on the purity of the node.

When the miner is full, it will stop animating and making noise, and you must walk up to it and open its inventory with your use key (default E) and take the ore out. The miner can be picked up by pressing the "Pick up Miner" button in its inventory.

Trivia

 * The Portable Miner was first shown in the E3 trailer