Automation

Drill output, power, and the chunk-loading question — sourced from the game files rather than from forum threads.

Drill output

A drill mines by dealing mining damage on a fixed cooldown. Throughput is therefore damage ÷ cooldown, measured against the target's own health.

Drill	Mining damage	Cooldown	Damage per second
Crude Drill	30	1s	30.0
Drill	60	1s	60.0

Throughput calculator

Drill

How many drills

Target health

Damage per second—

Seconds to break target—

Target health for common blocks is listed below. This is the arithmetic the files support; it does not model conveyor backlog or power loss.

Block health, for the calculator above

Player-placed blocks all carry health 1. These are the mineable objects that actually take time.

Block	Health
Wall Excavation Dungeon Block	2,778
Great Wal Block	1,812
Wall Obsidian Block	1,812
Wall Excavation Void Block	1,667
Wall Excavation Border Block	1,631
Wall Excavation Block	1,528
Wall Passage Block	1,415
Pandorium Crystal	1,287
Wall Excavation Rock Block	1,250
Cryo Pod1	1,186
Wall Lava Block	1,086
Small Pandorium Crystal	1,029
Crystal Meteor	988
Wall Desert Explosive Block	988
Wall Desert Temple Block	988
Wall Desert Temple Block2	988
Wall Alien Block	950
Wall Crystal Block	950
Wall Gleam Wood Block	950
Wall City Block	892

The very large health values are not drill targets

21 mineable objects — the large ore boulders — carry a health value of 999,999,999. At a Drill's 60 damage per second that would take over 60 hours, which is not a real mechanic. Treat that number as a marker meaning "not meant to be drilled" rather than a duration, and do not put it in the calculator. We report it because it is what the file says; we just do not pretend to know why.

Do drills work off screen?

The evidence says no — drills stop when nobody is nearby. Here is exactly what that conclusion rests on, so you can weigh it yourself.

The game has an explicit chunk-loading system. The compiled code contains UnloadedChunkCD, AreaLoadedCD and FindUnloadedChunksToLoad — entities are gated on whether their chunk is loaded.
There is a component whose whole purpose is to exempt something from that gating: KeepAreaLoadedCD.
No drill, conveyor or robot arm prefab is authored with it. We checked every prefab in the package; none carries a keep-area-loaded component.
Drills do carry NearbyEntitiesTrackerAuthoring (detection radius 1.45) and OverrideNetworkSyncDistanceAuthoring, which are proximity-based by definition.

What would settle it beyond doubt: reading the mining system's update loop (UpdateMinerJob in Pug.Automation.dll) to confirm it skips unloaded chunks. That is compiled code, not data, and we have not decompiled it. So this is a well-evidenced answer, not a proof, and we would rather say which it is.

Power

103 objects carry electricity data (sourceEnergy, whether they block current, and whether they act as wire). Generators and consumers are listed on their own item pages.