The Crust MDR Guide: Mobile Drilling Rig Mining, Routing and Unloading

Type

Large vehicleNot a building

Mines

Surface regolithExtractors work underground

Needs

A routeNot a conveyor link

Unloading

Truck + DockFully automatable

Area

Research-gatedNot a fixed radius

Disposable

YesSellable since 1.0

A vehicle, and everything that follows

The single sentence that explains the MDR’s place in the game is the community wiki’s: it is “a large vehicle that mines the moon’s surface for regolith.” Compare that with the stationary Regolith Extractor, which the same wiki says “can only be built underground” and “must be placed covering a 3 x 3 area (9 squares) of rich resource deposits.” The two tools mine the same material from opposite ends: the extractor is a fixed building bolted to an underground deposit, and the MDR is a machine you drive to a surface field.

Consequences worth holding onto:

• The MDR has a route, not a connection. It cannot be cabled to your base the way a module can, so moving its output home is a transport problem. This is why so much of the MDR’s interface is route controls.
• It is built, not placed. One official fix mentions the “Large Vehicle Assembly Facility” and a rig that “would not continue construction” after the facility was toggled off and on — so a rig is manufactured at a facility and can be interrupted mid-build.
• It can be sold. The 1.0 feature list includes “Sell MDRs (mobile drilling units) and harvesters, remove outposts.” Notice the phrasing there: the developers’ own acronym expansion is “mobile drilling units”, while the module is called a Mobile Drilling Rig everywhere else. Same machine, two official names — worth knowing if a search for one term turns up nothing.

The interface grew up in public

If you want to understand what the MDR is like to play, read the patch notes in order. They describe a machine that started out fiddly and was steadily rebuilt, and almost every change is about telling you something you previously had to guess.

Two things stand out. First, routing is the function the developers kept adding to, not mining: a route button for the rig, then a truck-route button inside the rig’s own interface, then a crash fix on the same code path. Assigning routes from inside the rig is the intended workflow, and it took several releases to get right. Second, the interface only became informative at the very end — the analysis section listing nearby extractable resources arrived in 1.0, months after the routing work. Before that, you were choosing sites without the rig’s own opinion on what was around.

Choosing where it mines

The question newer players ask most is how to pick a mining area, and the accurate answer has two parts.

The assignment itself is a click. You point the rig at a target, and the interface confirms it. That is what the right-click fix above documents, and it is what the route button exists to serve.

How much ground it covers is a research property, not a fixed number. The community wiki lists a whole family of MDR upgrades, and one of them is explicitly about area — an “Mining Area” line of upgrades that “increase the area that is mined”, sitting alongside separate families for Mining Speed, Mining Efficiency, Cargo Bay and a set that reduces how much slag comes out of the rock. The wiki also notes something important about how these work: “The upgrades unlocked with this research are automatically applied to all MDRs, current and future.”

That last line changes upgrade timing. You are not upgrading one vehicle; you are upgrading the class. Researching MDR upgrades makes every rig you will ever build better, which means the arithmetic on a second rig is different from what it looks like.

The developers separately rebalanced the geometry. The June balance update records “Mobile Drilling Rig: base digging radius increased 20->25, base distance penalty increased 0.4->0.5, base digging speed reduced 0.02->0.015, base cycle time increased 8->10.” Read as a set, that is a rig that covers more ground per position but works it more slowly — a deliberate trade toward fewer relocations. And the same update stated the goal outright: “Reduced micromanagement of the Mobile Drilling Rig by lessening the need to frequently relocate mining operations.”

Unloading: the half of the MDR nobody explains

Every “how do I empty my MDR” question is really a question about the receiving end, and the game’s answer is a chain rather than a button.

The community’s Cargo Dock page lays it out. Cargo trucks “can be used to automatically transport Resources between the Mobile Drilling Rig or Ice Harvester and the main base,” and if you have built a Cargo Dock the same page says the truck will empty itself into the Dock and head back for more — which is what makes “this transport 100% automatic.”

So the working setup is three parts, and any one of them missing is why the chain stalls:

1. The rig mined and is holding regolith internally.
2. A cargo truck assigned to run between the rig and home.
3. A Cargo Dock at the home end, which is where the truck deposits.

The Dock is not optional decoration. It is described as an “unloading and storage area for resources brought in by cargo truck”, and the same page adds a detail that explains a lot of confusion: it “has 6 programmable output conveyor ports: 4 on one side and 2 on the opposite side,” and — in the page’s own words — “Drones do not appear to take from the Cargo Dock”, so those ports are the only way out. The Dock is a terminal, not a warehouse: what arrives there leaves by belt, and you have to build those belts.

The wiki’s siting advice is worth following: the Dock is “usually placed on the surface near a Conveyor Elevator” so that bulk material arriving from a rig goes straight down to processing rather than being hauled across the surface.

What the satellites around it are for

The MDR does not work alone, and two neighbouring tools answer questions the rig itself raises.

The Ore Detector decides where to point it. The community describes the Detector as a scanner for “finding ore-rich regolith veins” that “uses battery power, depending on the size of the scan area” and “cannot be installed indoors.” It is the surface counterpart to probing, and it is what turns “somewhere out there” into a named field.

The Rover builds the resource map the rig works from. The research that equips the rover with its geological scanner describes the outcome as creating “a resource map of the Moon’s surface” that “helps determine mining sites for the Mobile Bore Unit” — and “Mobile Bore Unit” there is another community name for this same machine. So the rover and the detector both feed the rig’s placement decision, and the rig’s own analysis section is the third input.

Surveys and scarcer ground got better in the same update. The June balance pass increased “saturation of titanium, rare-earth minerals, aluminum, and water by 25-100%, and silicon by 10%” for MDR mining on the orbital map. Rigs were not just made easier to run that month; the ground they work was made richer.

Variants, and what the achievements reveal

The MDR is one of three large mining vehicles. The community’s vehicle list groups the big machines as the Mobile Drilling Rig, the Ice Harvester and the Helium-3 Harvester, and the 1.0 announcement confirms the family by name: it added “New research that upgrades the Mobile Drilling Rig, the Helium-3 Harvester, and the Ice Harvester.” One research, three harvesters — so if you are investing in MDR upgrades, the same technology line upgrades your ice and helium-3 extraction too.

The achievement data is the honest measure of how many players actually push this system:

A third of players have exhausted a vein, and one in five has a hidden achievement almost certainly tied to drilling hard — Mad Miner is the only mining-flavoured achievement in the set with its description withheld, and it is far more common than the ice equivalent. Meanwhile ice vein depletion sits at 4.1%, an eightfold gap that lines up with official notes reducing ice vein counts by difficulty. If you were wondering whether ice side-content is core or optional, 4.1% is your answer.