Muck and how to handle it
Muck and how to handle it
Section titled “Muck and how to handle it”Muck is the material produced when ore is mined with a pickaxe or when ore or rock is blasted. It is the basic transport and processing unit for the mining system: the ore is inside the muck, and the muck must be separated before the ore can be recovered efficiently.
Layers, concentration, and availability
Section titled “Layers, concentration, and availability”A muck block can contain up to eight layers. A pile may therefore look like a single block while holding several separate layers of material. Muck piles can settle and spread like a pile, but they use IME’s custom pile handling rather than ordinary falling entities. When looking at a muck pile, only the top layer is visible.
Ore muck carries two values:
- Concentration is the amount of metal represented by the layer. The reference default is 25 concentration per ore layer, with 100 concentration representing one ingot’s worth of metal.
- Availability is the fraction of that metal that a process can recover. Separation, roasting, and flux improve the result.
The default availability by muck grade is:
| Grade | Default availability |
|---|---|
| Coarse | 15% |
| Raw | 25% |
| Fine | 35% |
Ore blocks also produce host-rock muck that takes up room in a furnace charge and does not add metal. Keep ore-bearing muck separate from stone muck whenever storage and processing space allow.
Bags and collection
Section titled “Bags and collection”Muck is not stored as a normal inventory item. A muck bag is the intended way to carry it. The bag progression is:
- Rawhide
- Linen
- Leather
- Hardened leather
Equip the bag before collecting a pile. A normal shovel can handle muck in the early-game workflow; the later muck shovel digs a 3x3 area and makes clearing much faster.
When filling or emptying your bag, the muck pile order is randomized, so you need to keep the layers separated.
A Muck Bin stores up to 32 layers and can be placed on a boat or in a cart. Use bins for valuable ore or for buffering a machine line. Muck cannot be placed in chests or crates.
Choosing the next process
Section titled “Choosing the next process”| Input | Best next step | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Coarse ore muck | Crush | Coarse muck cannot be processed by sluice baffles |
| Raw ore muck | Screen | The raw ore have less availability than fine ore muck |
| Fine ore muck | Proper sluice baffles or a furnace | Fine muck has the highest starting availability |
| Stone muck | Sieve or a planned tailings dump | It has no metal content |
See Sluices and screens for the water and size- separation chain. See Smelting furnaces for the point where concentrated muck becomes pig metal.