Electric Drill
alaindustrial:electric_drill
Summary
The Electric Drill is the mod's first powered hand tool: a diamond-tier pickaxe that runs on EU/FE instead of durability. With charge it mines a touch faster than a diamond pickaxe and spends 50 EU/FE per block. A full buffer is 10 000 EU/FE — about 200 blocks on one charge.
Mini-example: mine ~200 blocks on a charge; when it runs flat, it doesn't stop — it just mines at hand speed until you recharge. Same mining level and drops the whole time, just slower.
Like the mod's other EU/FE items, the drill has no durability and never breaks: the bar under the icon shows EU/FE charge (gold), not wear. It charges where the Energy Pack does — in the Battery Box charge slot and from a worn pack.
The drill has a second tier — the Diamond-Tipped Electric Drill: the same tool, but it digs faster and can switch its drops to Silk Touch. See Diamond tip (upgrade) below.
A third and final tier follows it — the Netherite-Tipped Electric Drill: faster still, hitting harder, and carrying half again as much charge. See Netherite tip (upgrade) below.
Energy
Its own EU/FE buffer, outside the energy network. Charges in the Battery Box slot and from a worn pack; spends charge mining.
| What | Value |
|---|---|
| Buffer | 10 000 EU/FE |
| Charging | Battery Box slot / worn pack, fills in ~16 s |
| Cost | 50 EU/FE per block broken |
| Passive drain | none |
Instant-break blocks (grass, torches, flowers) are free — just as they never wear a vanilla tool. In creative, blocks drop nothing and no EU/FE is spent.
How it behaves
Mining (charged): mines everything a pickaxe should, a touch faster than diamond. Diamond ore, obsidian, even ancient debris — drops match a diamond pickaxe. Each block costs 50 EU/FE. Mining (flat): below 50 EU/FE it mines at hand speed, but keeps the mining level and drops, and spends no EU/FE. Charging: the Battery Box charge slot and a worn Energy Pack both accept it automatically. Combat: hits a touch harder than a diamond pickaxe (6 damage), but attacks spend no EU/FE. Enchantments: the enchanting table and anvil treat it like a diamond pickaxe — Efficiency, Fortune, Silk Touch, Unbreaking, Mending. (Unbreaking/Mending are harmless but useless on an unbreakable tool.) Torch placement: with the drill in your main hand and torches in your inventory, right-clicking a block places a torch — the drill stays in your hotbar and the torch is pulled from your inventory (one used up). It prefers the Enriched Uranium Torch (which stays lit underwater) and falls back to a normal torch. Each placement drains 5 EU/FE. If the charge is below that the torch is not placed: the drill shows a message above your hotbar, no torch leaves your inventory, and the charge is untouched — the torch is powered, not free (you can still place one by hand for free by moving it to your hotbar). That message only appears where a charged drill would really have placed something: where a torch cannot go anyway (no support, or water for a normal torch), a flat drill stays out of the way entirely — no message, and the click goes to your off-hand item as if the drill were not in your hand. Placing a torch this way sounds exactly like placing one by hand, for you and for anyone nearby. Where a torch can't go (no support, or water for a normal torch) nothing happens and nothing is spent. In creative neither the torch nor the EU/FE is consumed and the charge check does not apply. No torches in your inventory and it does nothing (a torch in your off-hand still works as normal). No cooldown. In creative: no charge is spent — not on mining, not on torches — just as a vanilla pickaxe takes no durability damage in creative. The rule covers the whole powered family; see the Energy Pack and the Battery Pouch. HUD: while in hand, an icon + charge % + bar (green → gold → red) show top-left. Same H key toggles it as the Energy Pack.
Inventory
Not applicable — the drill has no internal item storage (stack size 1).
Block Properties
Not applicable (item).
Recipes
Built at a workbench around a finished diamond pickaxe — it sits in the centre and gives the drill its diamond mining tier (the drill itself digs a touch faster, 8.5 vs a diamond pickaxe's 8.0). Two batteries flank it, an electronic circuit sits below between two copper coils, and an iron body caps the top. All the power components gate the drill behind LV infrastructure. The charge held by the batteries carries over into the finished drill.
Diamond tip (upgrade)
The Diamond-Tipped Electric Drill (is the drill's second tier. Exactly two things differ from the base drill; everything else is inherited unchanged.
1. It digs faster. Mining speed 10.0 against the base drill's 8.5 (and a netherite pickaxe's 9.0). The mining tier does not change — it stays diamond, exactly like the base drill: the upgrade makes the work faster, it does not unlock new blocks.
2. Switchable Silk Touch. Sneak + right-click flips the drop mode:
normal mode (what a freshly crafted drill starts in) — drops exactly like the base drill, so ore comes out as raw material and still feeds the Macerator for doubling; Silk Touch mode — the block drops as itself: ore as ore, glass as glass, leaves as leaves.
Why switchable rather than permanent: the base drill can already be given Silk Touch at an enchanting table, but a vanilla enchantment is one-way — it permanently locks out Fortune (the two are mutually exclusive) and it breaks the ore-doubling chain, because ore stops dropping as raw material. A toggle solves both.
The mode is visible without guesswork: while it is on, the item carries the enchantment glint and lists "Silk Touch I" in its tooltip (the mode is the real vanilla enchantment, not a separate parallel flag), and a dedicated tooltip line shows the state and reminds you of the sneak + right-click control. Switching plays a click and prints a line above the hotbar.
The converse follows too: if you enchant the upgrade with Silk Touch yourself at a table, the drill honestly reports "mode on", and the toggle will switch it off. There is one state, not two that can disagree.
Inherited unchanged: the 10 000 EU/FE buffer, 50 EU/FE per block, 32 EU/FE/t intake, the same charging places, torch placement on right-click at the same 5 EU/FE, no durability, hand-speed mining when flat, and creative behaviour. The one control difference: sneak + right-click on a block switches the mode instead of placing a torch — torches go down with a plain right-click.
Recipe: — the base drill in the centre, a row of three diamond dust above it (the "tip coating" itself), two invar ingots at its sides (the body), and a silver gear below (the head drive). None of those three materials were consumed anywhere in the mod before — the upgrade gives them their first use.
The drill's charge carries over into the upgrade. There is no need to run the drill flat first: whatever EU/FE it held, the upgrade comes out holding. Both share the same 10 000 EU/FE buffer, so nothing is lost on the way and a full drill gives a full upgrade. This is the mod's general rule — energy moves into the result instead of burning — and every recipe whose result has an EU/FE buffer of its own behaves the same way (see the battery).
Place the drill in the grid by hand. The recipe accepts a drill in any state — empty, charged, enchanted — and laying the grid out yourself always works. The auto-fill button, though (the recipe book, and the "+" in viewers like REI/JEI), will not find a charged drill and will report missing materials. That is a Minecraft limitation rather than a mod one: auto-fill looks for an item whose components exactly match the recipe's display stack, and the display shows an empty drill. It is the same reason auto-fill never picks up enchanted or renamed items, in any recipe in the game. Laying the grid out by hand takes a couple of seconds and works with any drill.
Netherite tip (upgrade)
The Netherite-Tipped Electric Drill (is the line's third and last tier. Exactly three things differ from the diamond tip; everything else is inherited unchanged, the switchable Silk Touch included.
1. It digs faster. Mining speed 12.0 against the diamond tip's 10.0 (and a netherite pickaxe's 9.0). The mining tier does not change — it stays diamond, exactly like both tiers below. Vanilla 26.2 has no tier above diamond at all, so "netherite" here is about how fast the work goes rather than about new blocks: the same relationship a vanilla netherite pickaxe has to a diamond one.
2. It hits harder. Attack damage 7 against 6 on both tiers below — the step vanilla gives netherite over diamond. Attack speed is unchanged, and attacking still spends no EU/FE.
3. It holds more charge. A 15 000 EU/FE buffer against the 10 000 the first two tiers share. At an unchanged 50 EU/FE per block that is ~300 blocks on a charge instead of ~200. The per-block cost deliberately does not rise with the buffer: the tier is paid for in its recipe (netherite), not by charging more EU/FE for the same work.
Inherited unchanged: the switchable Silk Touch mode (sneak + right-click), torch placement on a plain right-click at 5 EU/FE, the 32 EU/FE/t intake, no durability, hand-speed mining when flat, and creative behaviour.
The craft takes two steps, and the second one is at a smithing table — the way every netherite upgrade works in vanilla.
Step 1 — assemble the head (crafting bench). Three netherite scrap along the top row, then a netherite alloy ingot, an electrum gear and a second alloy ingot below them. That yields the Netherite Drill Head. The step exists for a mechanical reason: a smithing table has only three slots, and four components do not fit into them — the head folds them into one part.
Step 2 — fit the head (smithing table). Template + the diamond-tipped drill + the drill head. The template is not consumed, exactly like the vanilla netherite one.
The template — the Netherite Drill Upgrade Smithing Template — is found in bastion remnant chests, in the same four loot tables vanilla hides its own netherite template in, at a 20 % chance per chest. Like the vanilla one it duplicates on a bench: 7 diamonds + 1 netherrack around the template give two back. It only ever has to be found once.
Charge and mode both carry over. In 26.2 a smithing table assembles its result through TransmuteRecipe.createWithOriginalComponents, which copies the base's whole component map. So the netherite drill inherits not only the diamond tip's EU/FE (the result's buffer is larger, so nothing is clipped) but its enchantments and its Silk Touch mode along with them. That is broader than the charge transfer one tier below, and it comes for free — no mod recipe serializer is involved.
It also settles the old complaint from as a side effect: the note about laying the grid out by hand does not apply to a smithing table, which has no auto-fill to trip over a charged drill.
Progression
The mod's first powered tool — a bridge between the energy progression and hand mining. Available after the Battery Box and the Energy Pack. Its second tier is the diamond-tip upgrade above, gated behind the Alloy Smelter (invar) and the Macerator (diamond dust). Its third and last is the netherite tip — faster, harder-hitting and longer-lasting — gated behind a Nether trip for netherite plus that same Alloy Smelter for the netherite alloy. Other electric tools (chainsaw/hoe/saber) are future work.
Related
Energy Pack — charges the drill in your inventory. Battery Box — charges the drill. Tempered Iron Pickaxe — the non-powered alternative earlier on.
Crafting
Shaped Crafting
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Electric Drill
Used in
Shaped Crafting
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Diamond-Tipped Electric Drill