Quarry

A Quarry is a machine added by the BuildCraft mod. It allows for automatic mining of a large area.

Starting a Quarry
The default settings of the Quarry will occupy an area of 11x11x5 (not including the actual Quarry block itself) and excavate a 9x9 area of land. These dimensions can be modified with Landmarks to increase the size, up to 64x64. You will need to activate the Landmarks by right clicking on them to set the size you want.



Upon starting, the Quarry will start building its frame and clear the area within it. Once the frame is complete, it will spawn a crane-like structure that will begin to mine the area one block at a time. These blocks will be deposited into any adjacent chest or will be spat onto the ground if there isn't one. You can also pipe out your excavated blocks. There is no need for a Wooden Pipe to fetch the items, the Quarry will place the items into a connected Stone Pipe, Cobblestone Pipe, Gold Pipe, Iron Pipe or Diamond Pipe on its own.

In the event the quarry encounters lava, the rest of the blocks under the lava will not be mined, because the quarry is coded to stop at lava, or bedrock. A wise preventative measure to prevent lava from causing your quarries difficulty and a strategy that many employ, is to set make sure it's filled with water. This will turn the lava into obsidian - which your quarry can mine. If the Quarry has finished all it can (all the bottom of the Quarry bedrock) it will need to be relocated before it will mine again.

Crafting recipe
Total Supplies:


 * 30 wood


 * 28 Cobblestone


 * 28 Iron Ingots


 * 16 Gold Ingots


 * 11 Diamond


 * 1 Redstone (Dust is no-longer needed)

The combined EMC (Energy-Matter Currency) value of a quarry is 130,260 EMC.

Underground Operation
A Quarry can function at any level. Simply placing it against a shaft wall and powering it is all that is required to start the default 9x9 area. The blocks in the frame area will be destroyed.



It is possible to create a landmark-drawn frame as per above ground, but it will be necessary to carve tunnels for all of the landmark beams, otherwise they will not link up.

Using BuildCraft
The Quarry, like all other BC consumers has an internal energy storage in which it stores MJ until it can perform an Operation. Because of this the Quarry can be powered by any BC compatible engine. For the Quarry to operate at maximum mining speed it needs 9 MJ/s which translates to 2 internal combustion engines running on fuel (outputting 5 MJ/t each) or 9 steam engines (these put out 1 MJ/t).

As the Quarry has only 4 sides free to stick engines to, If you want to go for the steam engine method you will have to invest in some conductive pipes to fully power the Quarry.



Using An Energy Link
Another way to power the quarry which is much more compact is by using an Energy Link connected to a Conductive Teleport Pipe. This will turn Industrialcraft energy from, for example, a Geothermal Generator into Buildcraft energy. Then the energy is teleported to the quarry regardless of where it is. This takes away the need for tricky and somewhat dangerous engines while lowering the amount of pipes and wires around your map. Also, if you have teleport pipes for the conductive teleport pipes you should have more to use as regular teleport pipes to teleport all the harvested materials from your quarry to one main processing line. By doing these things to power your quarry, you can change it from a hassling mess of redirecting pipes to an easy 5 piece (conductive teleport and stone pipes, regular teleport and stone pipes, and a quarry) set-up that takes only a few minutes to take down, move, and reset.

Uses In Conversion
The Quarry is instrumental if you would like to create a system that converts blocks into items, and back again, without player intervention. Under this system, blocks that you would like to place into pipes are pushed into the quarry area at a high level, so that the quarry will constantly mine these blocks and place them into Pipes.

If the quarry is close to finishing, or if you are in danger of stopping the quarry, place a Builder on top of the Quarry and put sand or gravel in it. The sand will be built and it will fall into the Quarry. The Quarry will mine the sand or gravel, which can be piped, through a filter, back to the Builder. This will ensure that the Quarry will never stop working.

Video Tutorials
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Tips

 * Instead of using one Combustion Engine use 2 Steam Engines and with 1 Diamond pipe sorting every coal it finds or half to the steam engines again so it uses itself.
 * The Landmarks specify an area up to 64x64, giving a maximum possible quarry size of 62x62. An area this large provides a low-maintenance quarry that doesn't need replacing nearly as frequently as the default 9x9 quarry, but be advised that mining from a quarry this large takes more than one hour per layer. Also, a few layers will fill several chests of sand, dirt and cobblestone, depending on the selected region (there is a lot of dirt and sand under water).
 * Mining in this fashion requires very little additional interaction from the player and is nearly fully automated, but is considerably less time-efficient than mining manually, and in particular, gathering the ores encrusted in the walls of a cave while exploring it. A good way to take advantage of both cases is to select a relatively small area to dig (the default is good) and to gather any ore visible on the walls of the quarry once it is finished.
 * Once placed the quarry will begin to clear all blocks inside the area, so remember not to leave stuff like Engines, Pipes or the Quarry itself inside the area, or it will magically disappear.

Bugs

 * There is a bug involving world anchors where the arm of the quarry dissapears but continues to mine so blocks are being mined by nothing, they are however still placed in the pipe.