Overview
Running through the details you may have missed! Hydroneer has a lot of hidden details beneath the surface that lack some clear explanations at the start. I hope to clear some of these up as well as giving some details on how they can be used to enjoy the game a bit more!Also due to the nature of the game and its Early Access state, this guide may not always be 100% up to date with the game, but I will come back regularly to update what needs it.
The intro…
I was hesitant to start a guide for this game since it’s in early access with an active developer and will be changing often, but this game has too much promise to ignore.
Another thing this game lacks, is any kind of actual instruction manual! There’s a lot of hidden mechanics underneath the surface of just “digging for gold”, that go unnoticed as you casually play the game.
My Steam games list looks like a graveyard of Early Access games, so I’m writing up this guide to shed some light on those aspects since this game is definitely worth the effort and time to learn and thrive in this sea of mediocre failures on Steam!
As for the moment, I have some real world projects that need some work, so my game time is limited. I plan on checking back in after a couple more updates and then updating this guide as necessary. Nothing in here should be horribly out of date though, judging by the recent dev logs I’ve seen, so… enjoy!
For starters
I’ll assume most people know the basics of playing the game. If not, there are several Youtubers who have covered this game on their channels and offer a good starting point of what’s possible and the general gameplay involved. I’d highly recommend watching some of their videos, so you can get a grasp on the basics… but most of you have probably come to this game thanks to those videos, haven’t you?
You dig a dirt in a bucket, dump it into a pan filled with water and brush. Easy and simple. Let’s skip that part, shall we? Let’s move on to some very simple details of how to do some slightly more advanced features. For this, we’ll need only some of the most basic supplies you can already buy in the first store you come to.
Pans are the most ideal vessel in the game for carrying ore and dirt. Although buckets can hold 2 Improved Shovel scoops, they require scooping the dirt into them and then another step of dumping it into the pan.
With the basic setup we’re dealing with, you will find it faster to skip the buckets and shovel dirt directly into the pans, even though you can only get half as much.
Using the basic pipes you can buy at the store, on the starter plot you own, you will want to connect and run a pipeline that will drip water down to the bedrock layer where you’ll do your mining. Pans can be filled using the dripping pipes instead of being submerged entirely under water, and we want to use this feature to our advantage!
Place a pan under the dripping water and let it stay there, always filling up. Now, shovel your scoop of dirt in the pan and proceed to immediately brush them. Congratulations! You’re now on your way to automating the system! 🙂
This process saves you the steps of dumping the buckets, running up to the surface of your mine, submerging the pan and then chasing the ore that pops out, all over the map.
Buy multiple pans and add some splitters to the pipeline to increase the capacity you can dig up at a time. In about 30 minutes you’ll have more than enough gold to get started earning some “real money”!
Know your automation tools
There are several tools available to you to use, but relatively little documentation on them, short of a few notes in their description and the wiki page.
We’ll start with some of the key components for automation that can be purchased at the second equipment store on the map. For now, we’ll focus on the machines and will get into the water flow and pipelines a bit later, since that needs its own section!
Here are some pointers to look out for with each major component in this part of the game, to date.
They come in 2 types – Ram Drills and Goliath Drills.
The Ram Drills will always drill surface level dirt and therefor, produce smaller dirt pieces and ore nuggets. However, these drills will not physically alter the dirt under them and can be left running indefinitely in one spot without needing to worry about running out of resources.
Goliath drills produce much more dirt and much larger nuggets as the dirt they dig is dependent on the level at which they dig it. So a Goliath drill placed a few layers up from the bottom depths, will produce large nuggets of ore.
The downside to these drills, though are that they use the physical dirt under them and will eventually run out of diggable space beneath them. They may either hit bedrock, or not be able to reach any more dirt below and need to be moved once this happens. These drills require regular attention and can’t be left alone very often.
As of the current state of the game, these drills also frequently break down and need near-constant maintenance.
For anyone who’s played an automation game (can we now consider that a genre?) these are familiar, but introduce mechanics not present in other games. Conveyors can be placed and left alone without fear of breaking down. They also rely on, but transport water as well.
When placing a conveyor, there is a small arrow on the bottom portion that shows you the direction the conveyor will be moving.
They’re basically grinders and, as the name implies, the break up the large pieces of dirt into smaller ones while also transporting the dirt the same as a conveyor.
This is where the dirt grinding and ore cleaning takes place and is, perhaps, one of the most important pieces of machinery in a factory.
They are 2 blocks tall and feed via the top, so it is necessary to either place them below the other conveyors you have, or to raise the conveyors using an incline.
There is a small spout near the bottom that ejects the ore that is produced form the dirt. It’s important to note that this ore will spit our randomly and chaotically onto the surfaces below, so having some kind of containment is highly recommended!
A sorter can be placed after the harvester, to filter out the different types of ore. The ore that it is set to, will turn 90 degrees to the direction of the conveyor line, and empty out the side.
These can also be placed before a harvester and then set to filter dirt. “Why filter dirt?” you ask? Because, remember, they sort the material out, 90 degrees from the direction the conveyor was traveling – this makes it possible to turn the conveyor line 90 degrees, with ease!
Also note here, that there are 3 potential water sources that need to be managed – one for the intake, and 1 for each direction the sorter can distribute the ore.
Tools of the trade (crafting)
This part is relatively straightforward. These are tools you can buy to help make your life a bit easier. We won’t spend too long here.
The basic shovel requires 4 scoops to fill a bucket. The improved shovel requires 2.
The pickax – this removes dirt without producing any chunks in return and it also breaks up large pieces of dirt into smaller pieces. Comes in handy for fast tunneling and is recommended in order to get you moved down to the more lucrative layers of dirt early on.
Forging tools and gem cutter – very straightforward as well. You will need all of these available in order to produce goods you can sell and use. Use the gem cutter to cut the rough stones into usable gems.
Only thing to note is that clicking in the anvil will select the items you produce. The materials needed are then displayed as a diagram on the anvil.
Also make sure you place your metal/gold bars back into the forge to heat up before you start hammering them on the anvil!
Place an item on the scale to see how much it weighs (bottom number) and it’s base value at the jeweler’s shop (top number).
This cuts your bars in half, providing you with 2 bars each worth exactly half of the original bar.
This will become your new roommate. You will spend most of your fortune buying these in bulk! Use them to repair broken equipment that starts to spark.
This handy little gadget can pick up loose ore, shards, gems and dirt chunks that have a knack of flying around your factory.
The truck can be used for hauling items. Once you relocate to a larger claim, you will no longer be in walking distance of a store, so the truck becomes your lifeline to the outside world! It will become your best friend and worst enemy all at the same time!
Other than using water and its turn radius, it’s important to pay attention to the truck bed in back. There are places where items can clip through the bed and cause some chaotic physics to happen once you try driving it.
The metal looking portion of the bed is where your items actually react to the truck and become “attached” (for lack of a better word) to your cargo space. While you hold an item and place it, the bottom of that items tends to clip through the truck bed when it’s out of your view. To avoid having the item launch into orbit, or having your truck form a tear in the space-time continuum, try jumping up and tossing your cargo in, or walking in the bed and placing them.
Letting the items fall naturally into the bed will ensure they don’t create a tear in the fabric of the universe when you try to drive!
The excavator is a beast to drive, has no turning radius and will permanently f*** up your terrain. Practice makes perfect though so, unless a “creative mode” gets introduced, the best option is to either buy a plot you don’t want to use and experiment, or have a second game saved to simply test your equipment out on.
Water, water everywhere!
This is the “Hydro” part of Hydroneer! As such, let’s take a moment to explore this feature.
You will see that pipes have a value they reduce water pressure by. Make note of this, as it is something we’ll discuss in a bit. Pipes come in different shapes and sizes for each. Here we have:
Basic pipes – They transport water from point A to point B.
Intakes – Introduce water into your system. Only 1 is necessary for each pipeline since more than that doesn’t improve the efficiency or water pressure in the line. The intake will start your water line off with a base pressure value of 50%
Pressure tanks – Each pressure tank will increase your pressure value by 25%. In order to function, the tanks need to be placed and THEN have a shard inserted.
Filters – 4 filters are needed on a pipeline in order to ensure the water feeding your machines is clean. Dirty/unfiltered water will cause frequent breakdowns. Note, however, that vehicles and conveyors are immune to the effects of dirty water and any lines run specifically for those things don’t need filters.
Valves – Turn water on and off. A pipeline who’s valve is turned off will not use water, drain shards, or have filters break. Any machines connected to the line will also turn off.
These make it possible to split your system off into segments where parts can run, without the others also running.
Corks – They plug open pipes. Pretty easy to figure out!
Intakes should always come first, followed by 4 filters in an easy to reach location. Since filters are the one section of your pipes that can break, you will want easy access to them.
Pressure tanks should be placed before your machinery. We need some basic math here. Start at 50 and then subtract the value of each pipe segment until you reach your first machine. Each tank will add 25% pressure, so here, you can add the number required to power your machine close to 100% capacity.
Providing them ideal pressure allows harvesters to take in chunks and process the dirt faster. It will also speed up the conveyors on the line. Drills will also function faster when they have ideal pressure.
Sometimes a slower conveyor is preferred for sorting the ore after it’s processed, but in order to avoid clogs and backups on your dirt-line, you want to move the conveyor system as quickly as possible!
It’s best to breakup your production line into conveyors and machines, since conveyors don’t need to have the water filtered. Also add valves to your drills to keep them separated from your other equipment, so you can quickly and easily turn them off while the rest of your machinery is running. You would want to do this if A) you have a backup of dirt before your harvester and B) you’re cleaning up stray ore with a magnet and inserting them into your sorters.
You can also run a separate lower pressure water line to your post-harvester conveyors in order to control their speed. Going full pressure on these lines can cause your ore to travel at mach 1 when you try to catch it in a container and bounce off any surface they hit. Since they don’t break, it is not necessary to have this line filtered.
The other use for the pipeline is for refueling. This is a simple line that runs from an intake, to an open pipe that drips water. Park your vehicle under the dripping water and line the opne water tank up with the pipe to automatically fill the tank. The other method for filling up requires running pans of water up to the tank, so this is much faster!
One tip – always carry an extra pan around in your truck! If you lose track of your water tank level, you can always fill it up while you’re on the road!
Making it work
There is rarely a need to run an overly complex conveyor and factory line. The simpler your line, the less prone it is to backing up or breaking.
Keeping your conveyors as level and straight as possible will help to avoid clogs on the ramps and around corners.
Small pieces of dirt will almost always form into larger pieces of dirt if they meet. While this may be helpful in cleaning up your site, this is detrimental to your machines! You want your dirt to be broken up into as small of a piece as possible while it’s on your conveyor system. This can be accomplished through careful placement of shredders and/or using Ram Drills over Goliath Drills.
A factory can essentially be divided into 2 halves – the half that processes the dirt and the half that processes the ore.
You want the drill side of your factory to always run at, or as near to 100% pressure as you can. This will improve virtually every aspect of your mining and processing. It is also vital that they conveyors and any systems attached are running at the same pressure level, or just above that of the drills. Having a large discrepancy between these speeds can cause you to not be as efficient in transporting your dirt, or cause your dirt to back up and form huge boulders.
Ramps and corners (where one conveyor empties into another) can slow down or “stall” the movement of some dirt chunks that get stuck on the sides of the conveyors. These will them glue themselves together into much larger pieces that can clog up your conveyors. Try to avoid placing an excess of these on your line.
If you have multiple drills on a line, space them out so that they don’t all deposit dirt onto the same section of your conveyor belts at the same time. This will cause both, large balls of dirt to happen and also occupy space in your shredders that can be used for the larger pieces.
So, here we have one of the key components to the game… it’s important to understand how these work!
Conveyors will move at a speed proportionate to the amount of pressure in the water line feeding them. To move them faster, place a pressure tank just before them, so that the pressure is as high as possible.
Fast moving conveyors will allow the dirt on them to spread out more, reducing the number of backups you experience.
These will grind up large pieces of dirt, into much more manageable sizes. Try placing them around choke points such as corners and above ramps, in order to grind up the large dirt pieces.
Often, if too much dirt is fed in to them at once, the smaller pieces will have a tendency to roll back into larger chunks immediately after the shredders. so avoid overloading your conveyors!
There is a dial on the side that allows you to set the material you want to sort – gold, iron, gems, shards and dirt.
In terms of our drill line, we can set these up and set them to sort our dirt for us. The dirt will then exit 90 degrees from where it entered; opposite the dial
Anything the sorter sorts, will also be placed dead-center on the conveyor afterwards.
This is a machine you want to function as close to 100% pressure as possible. Try to place a pressure tank on your pipeline right before it enters into the harvester, as a harvester that’s under-powered, will back up and clog with dirt easily.
There are some setups that are more optimal than others. You may notice that small flakes of dirt litter the sides of your machines. This is par for the course. Those small pieces, however, can form into huge balls of dirt when left alone for too long. Sometimes this will help them move along the conveyor line and get processed by the harvester. Other times, these will simply build up in a location that can’t access the factory line and will simply roll around, getting in the way of things. The Harvester is a notorious location for this happening!
To reduce the odds of this occurring, you can set up a line of shredders that continue moving the dirt after your harvester. This will allow you to clear up those stragglers and let your harvester continue to work on the incoming pieces. Using sorters, we can turn the system 90 degrees, and feed this overflow back into the main line to let it have another pass at being processed. Adding shredders between the sorters will also help keep the dirt chunks smaller.
Try allowing an escape route for the stray dirt. Eventually dirt will almost always back up the system. Although instinct would dictate enclosing the entire conveyor line and harvester. opening up one side of the harvester will allow any excessively large pieces to be expelled from the system and keep your line running, while enclosing the entire thing will just cause more and more to back up!
“Greed is good”: Making money
The first step to making money, is to make sure your ore is being processed efficiently. Here, it comes in useful if you setup your system on a different line and/or place a valve to separate this line, from your drilling. This will allow you to run them separately if you need to.
Since we covered how the Sorters work, at this point, setting them up to sort gold, iron, etc, no different. The thing we need to really keep in mind though, is that they eject the ore in the center of the side that the ore comes out.
Now, we can process the ore in 2 ways and it helps to know some mechanics involved here.
Gems cannot be smelted and therefor, should be caught in a pan after it’s sorted. They will tend to bounce around and cause a mess, but there’s not much you can do with them before they’re processed and cut.
Gold, iron and shards, can be smelted into ingots/bars that can be used to craft or power your pipeline. These can be caught in crucibles and placed on a forge for smelting.
When placed in a container like this, these cannot be moved or handled individually unless picked up one at a time, and will not respond to a magnet or fall out when the container is dropped. They are essentially calculated as one solid object, in terms of transporting.
To take the automation one step further, a crucible can be placed on a forge and setup on a conveyor system to catch the ore that drops and immediately smelt it. Not only does this save you a step, but it also reduces the lag caused by 500+ pieces sitting in a pot!
One of the hardest parts on this process is catching the ore!! You noticed how I kept talking about the Sorters placing the material in the center of the conveyors? This is the point you will want to notice that the most.
With a sorter placing the material directly in the center of its output and with conveyors moving at one set speed across the board, you can easily find the exact position each piece of ore will land. There is a slight “RNG” deviation, but not a lot.
Although logic would have us place a funnel at the end of the system to guide the ore into a container below, this can actually work against us. If that ore hits the side of a funnel, it could bounce off at any number of angles and miss the container below.
The best method at the moment, is to simply look to see at what point the ore is traveling at a 90 degree arc and hitting the ground below the sorter, then placing the top of your container at that location.
You’ll notice here, that the sorters toss out the ore into a concrete pit that’s about 1 square below them and one square out. A crucible is then placed one square below that block, so that the top of it is at the location the ore is traveling straight down at 90 degrees.
This setup works well for large quantities of smaller ore. Larger pieces, however, are much like playing the carnival game where you have to bounce a ball into a cup that’s barely large enough to fit it!
In order to make sure your larger ore pieces are centered into the crucible, you could add a slow moving conveyor immediately after the sorter and allow the ore to drop off the edge without much forward velocity. You can adjust this until you find a spot that the large ore falls on the center of a block and then place your crucible at that location.
Since there is very little variation as to where your ore falls, there is no need for a fancy setup with chutes, windows or funnels. Just watch the ore drop and place something to catch it in that exact spot every time!
Once your ore is smelted, you can easily remove the crucible and pour your ingots.
Using a scale, you can see how large and how much each bar is worth. You can craft an item using the anvil and then your gold, gems and iron become much more valuable and sell for a higher price. At this point though, you may have more gold bars than you know what to do with, so opting to sell the bars directly at the stock market, or jeweler can save you some time, if you don’t mind losing some of the value.
Automation
This game has a few ways you can start digging for that precious gold, most require some human interaction and aren’t truly automated, like we have in some other games. I’ll cover a few methods below that are least-to-most automated:
Panning:
The ultimate get-your-feet-wet, approach to getting gold. Although it can be sped up by running a water line to your location, as mentioned earlier, this is still entirely hands-on.
Excavator:
This would also include any technique of manually placing dirt on a conveyor that feeds into a harvester. You still need to move that dirt by hand and it requires your constant interaction.
Goliath Drills:
They’re big and can spew out huge chunks of ore, but they can only go so deep before eventually running out of dirt and shutting down. They require constant repairs and will always have to be moved after a few minutes of steady mining. Moving them also requires adding conveyors and more piping, so their setup can be time-consuming and only produce resources for a short time period.
This is the most automated you can get, but it comes at a cost – dirt management.
These drills will continuously spew dirt out, without depleting the ground below them. You need to make sure your setup is equipped to handle this constant flow, otherwise you’ll find yourself climbing through mountains of dirt!
The obvious solution is to place one harvester per drill, but let’s face it, we’re here to make an efficient factory and that’s far from being efficient!
Make sure you don’t flood a single conveyor with all of the dirt from all of the drills. It helps to have multiple lines feeding in to one harvester from drills set up in different locations/orientations.
Make sure the pressure to the conveyors around the drills is topped off, so that the dirt doesn’t get a chance to sit around and collect into larger pieces.
Add a shredder to any turns, above ramps and around the harvester. Those are areas that dirt tends to “stick”, so eventually the smaller pieces that form around the edges there, turn into a larger piece that gets moved into the shredders.
If dirt and/or resources start piling up around the corners of your conveyors when you turn the line, add an incline and drop them onto the conveyor below. This will center them more.
Lastly, place an overflow to an empty side of the harvester. To do this, add a shredder that pulls dirt away from the harvester and then filer it through sorters to loop back around into a shredder that feeds into the harvester again.
With those things in place, you can add over a dozen drills to a single harvester and not have an issue with Mount Everest forming inside your factory!
Tips and tricks
When you hold E, you can select where to place an item. This may work to place an item typically out of reach, though that item will fall at an angle to the ground.
If you look below your item, at the ground, you will notice a green dot while you’re holding something. That dot indicates where the item will fall/interact.
When dropping an item, it will fall perpendicular (flat) with the ground, instead of turned on an angle. Use this to create neat stacks of bars and place items such as crucibles in the center of a forge.
While large ore may look pretty and boost your ego a bit, smaller ore is easier to manage and the Ram Drills don’t require moving. Therefor, if you prefer automation to your factory, you’d want to use Ram Drills over Goliaths.
Always check your water pressure! I can’t overstate that enough!
Dirt can be ejected as chunks, from the side of the excavator, by pressing E. Line it up with a conveyor in order to catch and transport the dirt to your machinery.
Shoveling dirt onto the ground, creates a mound of dirt, not chunks of loose dirt.
Dumping a pan of dirt onto the ground causes the dirt to vanish.
Prepare to clean up a mess, if you dump over a pan full of ore or gems!! Not only will they spill, but they will explode.
Use your magnetic stick to lift things up onto your conveyors to be sorted into the proper locations.
Avoid overloading your conveyors and sorters. Sorters will often get “confused” and start to fail at doing their jobs if they get overwhelmed.
Adding a mixture of ore to smelt down in a single crucible will result in an ingot of the material there was the most of. The smaller material will be wasted.