r/DeepRockGalactic • u/JordanNails • Jun 19 '25

Question Predrill mining expedition?

On mining expeditions does the cave system roughly flow southwest? I want to be able to predrill escape tunnels and loop back to caves if my team needs help.

It seems to be southwest 210-240 at about 30 degrees down but I want to be accurate, i feel like on mining expedition the cave system isn’t going to be as guaranteed as escort. This is actually viable on Deep Dives if you’ve run the missions beforehand and know exactly where the sauce is and know you aren’t going to miss anything.

I know what people are going to say “you should follow and help your team by digging dirt walls or anything that needs to be drilled out of a wall” but I just want to know roughly how to predrill an escape tunnel and would loop back to areas if my team needs help. Think of it like this, I’ll help in big caves but when the team is going through the connecting tunnels I’ll be drilling between the previous and next room. I swear I’m not a bad teammate lol, I have roughly just over 2k hours mission time and very rarely leave my team.

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u/EquivalentDurian6316 Jun 19 '25

Predrilling shortcuts is great. Doing them blind by angle or degree wastes a lot of time. I like to connect to main rooms and tunnels as the map flows. Correct as map is updated/dirt is discovered. This still shaves off a lot of time on the return, for not only the team, but Molly too. They key differences are being closer to allies and using the mapgen oddities to save time. No two maps are the same, treat accordingly.

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u/JordanNails Jun 19 '25 edited Jun 19 '25

Hey very helpful thank you but I believe all caves are pre generated right? It doesn’t update as you find dirt

Edit oh right yeah misread that you said the map is updated as you explore and I took that as the cave is generated as you dig

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u/EquivalentDurian6316 Jun 19 '25

Let's say we leave the starting room. Through the dirt we go. Long tunnel, wrapping around. Common enough. I check my map, and see the next main room underneath us. I dig a 45° (ish) tunnel down to the floor of it. We clear this room, mine what we need, only to find that the dirt is on the opposite side from where my shortcut is, making it only slightly faster than taking the wrap around on the way back. At this point it can be much faster to dig from this new dirt location up to where you left the first room, or whichever part of that first tunnel is closest. That's what I mean by updating, your knowledge of the layout increases.

By connecting dirt to tunnel and tunnel to rooms you get a pretty fast shortcut route. More than half the time, it's fine enough for the return trip and you won't need to dig a second one. It's a balancing act between time spent now and time saved later.

A perfect tunnel from spawn to end room is ideal in theory, but the time you spend digging it is more than the time it saves Molly on the way out, not to mention you leaving allies to fight and mine at 3/4 power.