Swarm Miner

Mining you delegate instead of doing.

Build a control station, write its orders, and release a swarm of drones that fly through solid rock, cut out exactly the ores you asked for, and carry them home.

No quarry, no holes the size of a chunk, no pickaxe. Swarm Miner drones phase through stone and break only the blocks your program names — the landscape stays as it was, apart from the ore that is no longer in it. You decide what is worth fetching, in what order, how far to look and how hard the swarm should work. Then you go and do something else.

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How it works

1. Craft and place a Swarm Control Station. It arrives switched off, so nothing happens until you say so.
2. Build a Launch Silo next to it (within 16 blocks). It is a flat 5×5 pad: a ring of Silo Casing with one Silo Core in the middle of a side, around a 3×3 Silo Hatch. Put the blocks in your inventory and right-click the core: it builds the whole pad for you, or tells you exactly what is missing.
3. Power it. Swarm Miner uses Forge Energy (FE/RF) only. Cables connect to the station or to any block of the silo.
4. Switch it on. A fresh station is already useful: one drone, working its own chunk, taking every ore it finds.
5. Collect the ore. Drones unload into the station's cargo hold. Pipe it out of any silo block, or open the Cargo tab.

When you want more, you program it and upgrade it — both below.

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The Program: tell the swarm what you want

The Program tab works like a Digital Miner filter list, with one thing it never had: order is priority. The higher a filter sits, the sooner the swarm goes after what it matches.

• Tag filters — everything with a tag, wildcards allowed: c:ores/diamond, c:ores/*.
• Mod filters — every block one mod adds.
• Block filters — one specific block, or with Fuzzy on, the same ore from every mod: one filter catches all four mods' silver ore.
• Works with ores from any mod out of the box, through the common c: tags.
• Switches for Take everything, Inverse mode (mine what is not listed), Fill holes (drones close the gap with the surrounding stone) and Silk touch.
• A live preview shows how many blocks each filter matches before you save it.

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Modules: grow the swarm

Upgrades are items that sit in the station's six module slots. They stack, and you can take them back out at any time.

Module	Effect	Useful up to
Drone Bay Module	+1 drone in the air at a time	7 (8 drones)
Overclock Module	+25% flying and digging speed	8 (3× speed)
Survey Range Module	+1 chunk searched in every direction	2 (a 5×5 chunk area, configurable)
Smelter Module	Cooks the ore in flight — with its own filter list	1
Ancient Ores Module	Lets the swarm mine the ancient ores, which drones otherwise leave alone	1

Ancient ores are locked behind their own module. Any block in the swarmminer:ancient_ores tag is skipped by every station without an Ancient Ores Module — even with Take everything or Inverse on. Out of the box the tag holds the c:ores/allthemodium, c:ores/vibranium and c:ores/unobtainium ore tags, and it is simply empty in a pack without them. Modpack makers can add their own late-game ores with a datapack.

Energy grows with the upgrades, not with the ore. A bare station is cheap to run because it earns little. Every module you fit multiplies all of the station's costs by 1.15, so a fully upgraded swarm is fast and very hungry. Mining a diamond costs the same as mining coal. The Swarm tab always shows the current cost per ore.

Each drone carries up to 576 items (nine stacks) before it flies home, so every round trip is worth making. When the cargo hold is full, drones wait in a ring above the silo until there is room.

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The Swarm Tablet: your stations in your pocket

A handheld with a home screen of apps. It sees every loaded station in your dimension, at any distance, and runs on its own FE battery that only drains while the screen is open. You install apps by crafting cards:

• Status (built in) — energy, drones out, chunks held.
• Cargo — Inventory Card — what every station is holding.
• Control — Command Card — switch stations on and off from anywhere.
• Program — Logic Card — the same filter editor as the station, in the field.
• Map — Cartography Card — a station's search area from above, with every ore found, the silo, the drones and you.
• Alerts — Sensor Card — which stations need a visit and why.
• Network — Network Card — every other app now sees stations in every dimension.
• Settings (built in) — four themes.

And when a station runs out of ore, you get a pop-up telling you so — "Mining complete" or "Nothing to mine" — wherever you are.

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Built to be left alone

• 🔋 Forge Energy only, no other mod required.
• 🗺️ Chunk loading: a switched-on station keeps its own search area loaded, so the swarm keeps working while you are away. Each chunk has an energy cost, and it can be turned off per station or for the whole server.
• 🔌 Automation friendly: items and power go in and out through any block of the silo.
• 🛡️ Drones cannot be destroyed and never get stuck: they turn back while they can still afford the trip home, and never strand ore underground.
• 📖 JEI is supported, including next to the tablet screen.
• ⚙️ Every balance value — energy costs, drone limits, chunk radius, cost growth — is in config/swarmminer-common.toml.

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Installation

• Minecraft 26.1.2 with NeoForge 26.1.2 — every build, from 26.1.2.0-beta onwards.
• No required dependencies. JEI is optional.
• Install on both client and server.

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Modpacks and add-ons

You may include Swarm Miner in any modpack, public or private, free or monetised, provided the pack is distributed through an official platform (CurseForge, Modrinth) that downloads the mod from its official source. No need to ask.

Third-party add-ons and compatibility patches are welcome, as long as they do not bundle or redistribute this mod's files. The full terms are in LICENSE.txt inside the jar.

Credits

The tablet's in-hand pose is taken from Create: Redstone Link Tablet by FryD42 (MIT licence) — thanks. Full attribution is in LICENSE.txt inside the jar. Every sound in the mod is synthesised.

Created by DNomad. Copyright © 2026, all rights reserved, with the modpack and add-on exceptions above.
📦 Other projects: curseforge.com/members/dnomad/projects
Bug reports and ideas are welcome — the mod is actively developed.