These guys mine for you, based from their mining depot.
Demonstration video: https://streamable.com/ymk8h
You can also mine things like Uranium, by inputting the required fluid into the back of the depot. The mining depot has a small caution floor mat in front of where the drones spawn. If you block it, a warning will show, and drones won't be able to spawn.
The mining area is shown when hovering over a depot, it is a 80x80 area in front of the depot.
The mining drones and mining depot is unlocked from the start of the game (so you can use it instead of mining drills), and they don't require any power.
There are 2 technologies related to the mining drones:
- Mining drone speed: Increases walking speed, mining speed, and carry capacity.
- Mining drone productivity: Gives a chance to produce extra products when mining.
If you change the recipe or mine the depot, all the 'connected' drones will die. Painfully. So lets try to avoid that.
Each depot can hold 100 drones, and more under some circumstances. Drones will automatically be deployed when the resources in the depot become low.
The mod should detect all modded resources, and work correctly with them.
As far as performance goes, obviously they will not be as good as mining drills for super mega bases, due to the units and the script update. With a running save with over 2,300 active mining drones, the script update was only about 0.4ms. So you can probably have upwards of 10,000 mining drones without any problem. And of course, performance will be better in 0.18.