Your Drill Loadout DOES NOT WORK The Way You Think... | Deep Rock Galactic

Follow me down the rabbit hole as I discover exactly how the Reinforced Power Drills operate when modded with Hardened Drill Tips vs. Barbed Drills. I get to the bottom of what each mod actually does, how they affect your drill mechanics, and what the heck mining rate is.. The answers may surprise you...

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MeatShield’s Reinforced Power Drills Blog Post:

MeatShield’s DPS Calculator:

DRG Wiki:

[siirvend]

Dude, this is insane! The fact that it looks and sounds faster with HDT equipped really did feel like a reason to use it but I guess I'm a barbed drills guy now. With how often I have vampire equipped it's pretty much a no-brainer for me now!

[bgbong]

Honestly, they could better reward Hardened Drill Tips users by causing the user to be propelled forward by a small amount every time the drills break terrain. This may also have the added effect of allowing drillers to move faster while mining than walking normally, which sounds awesome to me.

[RedStar]

A driller main calling the drill audio rock knocks is the most driller thing ever. I love it.

[Uriel]

Driller was my first promotion and I majored in home improvement. This is to say I'm _always_ running short of fuel because I'm clearing floors, joining adjacent chambers, joining nearby plateaus, constructing staircases and inscribing the epic of the ancients in bas relief. I use a _lot_ of fuel making sure my crew has open access to everywhere.

[Sandblaze]

I think the drills should pull you forward at the rate it digs and completely remove the movement speed factor

[bluegolisano]

Heads up, there's a fair chance the issues described in this were fixed somewhat recently. HDT and the t3 mod both give an extra 20% movespeed while drilling each now, so this likely needs a follow-up vid!

[Mal-bec]

The issue is, the fastest way to drill with HDT is in fact not to hold the mouse button down constantly, but 'tap' it. Every two or three chunks of dirt destroyed, you let go and walk the distance to the edge of the tunnel you made, giving you a speed-up and conserving a bit of fuel. You just can't walk while drilling fast enough to make use of the upgrade as is.

[Aeotiz]

Ok so I had to sit on my hands to watch this whole thing before commenting and I’m glad I did b/c you address the whole “what is mining speed” issue partway through, but I still have to posit my experiences here as a case for using both speed upgrades.

I would like to see the digging experiment done straight down and as straight up as possible. I play haz5 as exclusively as my local pub lobbies will allow and taking both mining speed upgrades gives me the terrain-deleting power to flash-excavate fast enough to duck into a foxhole to avoid mactera, dig & ledgegrab repeatedly up to high places, out-pace grunts on a direct-down charge to a fallen teammate in a ravine, etc etc etc. Comes in handy on elimination or salvage missions where i can stand still, sweep my cursor around at a rock face, and carve out a shelf or half-dome for extra breathing room for my team. My point is, your horizontal digging distance test feels to me like the one form of experimentation that does not showcase any of the applications where a terrain removal rate outpaces your walking speed. There are so many times where digging faster than you can walk come in handy!! Like, any point in time when you’re digging, and doing anything else besides walking! (Jumping, falling, standing still).

AWESOME video, you’re doing Karl’s work, and shoutout to Meatshield/ppstac2 for their indomitable data work.

[Failzz]

So this video randomly popped up on my main page again almost a year after watching it, which prompted me to do some testing of my own and despite being mostly a driller player for said year, I'm now very unsure about my drill loadout once again.
I reread the blog post and everything seems to make sense, but decided to do some more "real world" testing anyways, by which I mostly mean digging at different angles until overheat and measuring with the laser pointer.

First off, what's easily noticeable and makes sense, is that the tunnels are much smoother with hardened drill tips and relatively consistent in length, about 15m at any (walkable) angle and indeed even straight tunnels seem to go a bit further than in this video, so there might have been some changes in the meantime.

But *without* HDT is where things get fucky. The tunnels are very rough, presumably due to the lower drill rate. Straight tunnels are still pretty consistent in length, but angled tunnels varied wildly in length, with some of them even being noticeably LONGER than with HDT, especially when digging upwards at an angle while spamming jump.
What I think is happening is the slower digging rate allows the player to walk right up in the corner of a dug out cube when going diagonally, which causes the next cube to be dug out at a slightly farther point than with HDT, resulting in higher distance and rougher tunnels.

In conclusion idk, I'll probably just pick HDT for the smoother tunnels since it's pretty easy to get stuck in rough tunnels, both while digging and passing through later.

[MeestahreL]

No change for me. I've been taking additional fuel anyways.
It really is funny tho. It's like a race car with wooden wheels. It CAN go fast, it's just holding itself back.

[captainkarrian]

as a fairly long time player this kind of shocked me, I had always assumed that taking the barbed drills was a stupid choice, believing that more drill speed would be more beneficial in more scenarios, but for me that cryo combo is just too good to pass up regardless. really well put together video with fascinating results, rock and stone.

[Failzz]

Now it makes so much sense why drilling a steep "staircase" upwards while jumping worked so much better and faster with both drill speed upgrades while just drilling to the escape pod didn't seem to take much longer with the double damage lol.

[Coulroperation]

They really need to boost your movement speed while drilling, because you are definitely drilling faster than you're moving! I tried stacking both speed addons once and it caused me to run out of fuel incredibly fast with almost no distance gained because of how fast they spin, without buffing your movement speed enough to actually utilize it.

[nikkeri]

There appears to be a increase in movement speed while drilling with the HDT now, i would think this propably makes the more viable now.

[TurtleKnite]

So just because this piqued my curiosity I wanted to do some testing of my own. I got these numbers doing 3 test digs in each direction up to overheat, using the permanent waypoint to make sure I was in my starting location before I measured.

I felt like this was missing one of the big things about the way we use drills which is that more often than not we're not drilling straight into a horizontal wall, but up or down as well and I wanted to know how the addition of falling/vaulting changed these distance numbers.

Barbed

10.5-11 at 0 Degrees
16-17 straight down
12-13 at 35 degrees down
15 -16 at 35 degrees up

Hardened

12-13 at 0 Degrees
23-24 Straight down
15-16 at 35 degrees down
17-18 at 35 degrees up

As it turns out, the vaulting from upwards drilling helps both about equally which is something I really wasn't expecting. I also wasn't using tap drilling as a lot of other people have pointed out, and during the vault drilling I noticed the hardened drill tips in particular definitely had times when they weren't drilling anything during the process. It's possible a different angle might make a difference here more, because we can see from the straight down that absent of movement speed, it is a pretty significant difference in how far they drill, so with more vaults on a more vertical path you might get further faster. But it's unclear. I might come back and edit this with more data but for now I gotta get going lol.

[blackwoodknight]

Literally booted up my game to check this, I've been playing with the double speed problem for nearly 60 player ranks, I can't believe it.

[Milkman-bues]

Very glad to have found a DRG YouTube channel that is as obsessed with the driller as I am, I still can’t explain why I just have the most fun by a huge margin when I play as him

[adammcmillen]

The disappointment of the drink made me laugh lol

[SIMULACRA]

You should try drilling straight down to figure out how far you can go, because you won't be hindered by move speed.

[QtheAllmighty]

Thanks for the deep dive (haha) into these mechanics. I had no clue the drills functioned like this.