The Quarry is an automatic mining machine added by BuildCraft. It can dig an area as large as 62x62 (with an area of 64x64 set, and 1 block wide on each edge saved for the quarry's frame) down to Bedrock. It will mine any block with certain exceptions. All things mined will be pumped out of the top by the Quarry (you can place chests, pipe, or an Item Tesseract on any face).
- The quarry will not mine blocks that are underneath lava.
- The quarry will not mine water either, instead water blocks are ignored.
- Placing a water source block in your quarry is recommended since lava will turn to obsidian.
Although the machine does not require any pipe to be connected in order to pump out mined items, players are advised to connect a Cobblestone Transport Pipe or a Stone Transport Pipe to any face, as the Quarry pumps out items itself; no engines or Wooden Transport Pipes are needed to pull items from the Quarry into the pipe (this is due to the immense amount of items pumped out by the Quarry). Should these be left on the ground, a notable framerate drop should be expected.
This is a very costly machine, costing no less than 11 diamonds (among other things), however, due to its usefulness for resource-gathering, it is generally seen as a mainstay of any Tekkit game.
Recipe
| Raw Materials | ||
|---|---|---|
| 11 | 
|
Diamond |
| 16 | 
|
Gold Ingot |
| 28 | 
|
Iron Ingot |
| 28 | 
|
Cobblestone |
| 30 | 
|
Stick |
| 1 | File:Grid Redstone Dust.png | Redstone |
The gears are crafted in this order:
7 Wooden Gear -> 7 Stone Gear -> 7 Iron Gear -> 4 Gold Gear -> 2 Diamond Gear
Powering the Quarry
There are many ways to power the Quarry. It can be powered with any type of BuildCraft energy directly, with either engines or through Conductive Pipes. Natively, the Quarry only accepts BuildCraft's MJ power, however, through the use of a converter, Industrial Craft 2's EU or RedPower 2's Blutricity may be used. The peak quarry energy input is about 92 MJ/t, full speed is attained with about 50 MJ/t.
If most of a player's power comes from EU, then it is advised to use an IC2 MV Consumer next to an Energy Bridge with a BC Producer for output to the Quarry.
You can also use Stirling Engines or Combustion Engines to directly power the Quarry.
Redstone Engines can no longer power the Quarry.
Setting an Area
If an area is not specified, the quarry will automatically use a 9x9 area. However, if you want to set the area to be larger, you need to use Land Marks. You'll need a minimum of three, although four can be used. Use the Land Mark to specify the length and width to a maximum of 64x64. Right click on one of the land marks once you have placed them, if placed correctly red lines should appear along them. Place the quarry down in one of the corners next to a Land Mark, which then should break, showing the area has been set.
Storage Space Tactics
When a quarry is used with landmarks, setting a 64x64 area, be advised about the enormous storage space requirements if all blocks are to be kept, especially because the top layers are probably pretty useless most of the time and the more valuable ores and crystals are in the lower regions of the world. When not enough chests are provided, the quarry will keep working and the block will pop out of the quarry or pipe and disappear after a short while, possibly destroying all diamond or other valuables in the set area! One option for getting around this problem is to sort unwanted items into an Incinerator or Void Pipe using a Diamond Pipe, or even just pumping those unwanted items into a pool of lava.
Another solution is to pipe unwanted blocks into an Recycler, which will then produce Scrap to be used in a Mass Fabricator. This greatly increases the production rate for UU-Matter without resorting to things like infinite cobble generation, and is an efficient method of using those blocks. Also, it is possible to pipe these unwanted products into an Autocrafting Table, or preferably an Automatic Crafting Table MkII. With a Minium Stone, you can convert it from cobble to flint to clay. Then, you convert the clay into clay blocks, and then iron to gold to diamond. By this way, the scrap materials are converted into diamonds. 1 diamond is 128 cobblestone, which is about 2 lines of cobblestone with the 64*64 quarry.
Storage Space Calculation
The chest with the largest capacity in Tekkit Lite is the Diamond Chest. This chest has 108 slots (although the Crystal chest is an upgrade, it does not provide more storage space).
So:
Diamond chest slots * stack size
108 * 64 = 6912 (maximum number of blocks if all spaces are filled with 64 per stack)
Quarry X * Quarry Z * Quarry Y
62 * 62 * 65 = 249,860 (maximum blocks per quarry dig. Note that I used the Y height of 65 because that's a pretty 'normal' height in a standard world.)
Maximum mined blocks / maximum storage space per Diamond Chest
249,860 / 6,912 = ~36.15
Then keep in mind that you can't cut a chest in two thus we need 37 Diamond Chests for the whole quarry to keep all mined blocks. Also, the additional space is probably needed as well because not all stacks will be filled to the 64 stack limit, thus create addition slot needs.
In total materials needed, 37 Diamond Chests would use up:
- 6 * 37 = 222 Glass
- 2 * 37 = 74 Diamond
- 8 * 37 = 296 Gold
- 8 * 37 = 296 Iron Ingots
- 8 * 37 = 296 Wooden planks
However, there are different ways of storing materials than Diamond Chests. Barrels, for instance, can store, with upgrades, up to 1024 stacks, which would reduce the cost to only 5 barrels. Deep storage units work even better, since one is capable of storing up to 2 billion items, though, like barrels, they must be the same item. Another option is to send materials into an Applied Energistics ME system, which can conveniently sort and store materials.
Repairing world
The end result of a quarry is generally a large hole half full of water, to remove the water a Wand of Cooling or a Terraformer set on desertification can be used. A Terraformer on flatification will fill in the hole with Dirt.
The easier but more "expensive" way to "repair" the world is the Filler It uses the same Energy like the quarry and can replace the whole hole with dirt or cobble stone (wich you do have enought cause of your quary) or you can set a single layer to get the hole covered on top so it would leave a Hollow.