How sites are ranked
Every 25–100 m across the map, the survey adds up what lies within the reach distance. The first deposit of an ore type counts its full priority, the second half, the third a quarter, so a spread of different ores beats a pile of one.
The tech tier buttons set the ore priorities from the game's recipe tables: an ore that 40% or more of that tier's blueprints need is top, 15% high, 3% normal, and the rest are skipped. Deep ore needs a drill, which arrives at Tier 3, so T1 and T2 show where the ores you will want sit, ready for when you can drill them.
Every drill in your save gets a timer automatically: the ore inside, the fuel in the can and the drill type are read from the file, the rate comes from game data, and the countdown shows whichever comes first, the drill filling up or its fuel running out. Each new save (your game saves every minute) resets the count to the real contents, and a drill whose contents haven't changed between saves is flagged as not producing. After about five minutes of saves the rate switches from the game figure to the rate actually measured from the ore count, so area speed bonuses are picked up on their own; emptying the drill restarts the measurement. Lock freezes the current rate, typed or measured, so nothing changes it; Reset rate unlocks it and starts measuring again. Typing a rate locks it automatically. The Drill timers list is sorted by what needs you soonest.
For a deposit with no drill yet, select it and the manual Drill timer appears: pick which drill it is and the rate fills in from the game's own figures (one ore every 15–60 s depending on the ore, electric 33% faster than biofuel, oil 50%), editable if your area drills faster; it also fixes the capacity (a biofuel drill holds 5 stacks, electric 20, oil 36; stack size depends on the ore), then Start, Pause and Reset. Selecting one of your own drills fills in its type and how much ore it held when the game last saved. While the file is being watched, every new save resets the timer's ore count to what the drill really holds and counts on from the save time. For a biofuel or oil drill you can also enter how many minutes of fuel it has (a full Biofuel Can runs a biofuel drill for about 125 minutes); the timer then counts down to fuel out and stops adding ore there. It keeps wall-clock time, so it carries on while this page is closed and shows an estimated ore count when you come back. All timers for the map are listed under Drill timers.
Click a marker to select it, then give it a status (Unmined, Part mined, Empty) and a note. Notes are kept in this browser, per map, and show as a coloured ring on the marker. A cave entrance also reports the rock nodes you have mined within 120 m of it; the game only records rock you have touched, so an untouched cave shows no mining rather than a count of what is left.
Set home, then click your base (a bed marker snaps it in place). Every tooltip and site then shows the straight-line distance and direction from home, and Measure gives the distance between any two points. In-game walking distance is longer wherever cliffs or water are in the way.
High-yield deposits count 1.5×. Exotics, oil and enzyme geysers, a cave within reach and a nearby landing zone add their own weights. Sites closer together than twice the reach are merged into the better one.
With Water within ticked, a site is only listed if lakes or rivers lie inside that distance of the site centre. Water and terrain are both read from the map colours: narrow streams, Styx's pale rivers and swamp pools are missed, and a few dark rock patches can read as water.
Terrain is a guide near biome borders. Walk the spot before you pour concrete.
Fan-made tool. ICARUS and its map art are the property of RocketWerkz; this page is not affiliated with them. Map images and reference node data come from community projects.