A typical mining operation requires a lot of time and planning to find a suitable location, transporting and assembling the necessary equipment along with the manpower, extract resources from the ground, transport resources out of the location for use, refinement, or sale, and then transporting and disassembling equipment to leave when the job is done (assuming it isn't left behind). And that's not accounting for any potential issues that may happen during any steps.
In fiction, this can be simplified with a resource extractor that can be dropped (similarly to a Drop Pod) or quickly assembled on a designated location, sometimes being able to refine the resource rather than transporting it to another place to do so, and then leaving in a similar fashion when its job is done. Typical attributes of this device include drills or lasers depending on what material needs to be broken through. Alternatively, magic or superpowers especially involving Dishing Out Dirt or Extra-ore-dinary can be used to extract resources from the ground for Power Profit Potential.
Planet Looters and Asteroid Miners tend to use these type of devices when extracting resources from planets and asteroids. Due to how powerful these devices are, they are sometimes repurposed for military use.
Sub-Trope of Easy Logistics. Compare Fast Tunnelling.
Examples:
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Fan Works
- Dungeon Keeper Ami: Thought about but prevented. In "Basic Functionality", Ami thinks about using Keeper Telekinesis to "pluck material directly out of the [ore] vein" but being limited to moving things she "owns" prevents that.
- With This Ring (2013): The source of Paul's Arbitrarily Large Bank Account is that the asteroid belt contains quite a lot of precious metals like gold and platinum, and it's very easy for even a novice Orange Lantern to focus their avarice sufficiently to make their power ring quickly turn a big rock into a pile of shiny coins. This is particularly relevant to the Earth 12 version of Paul, who never found a personal lantern to recharge the ring, but did use its single charge to mine out a very large platinum block, which he later sold for enough capital to establish himself in business.
Smashing a fairly large asteroid up, grinding it, sort of sieving it with a construct that pulled out what I wanted but left the rest of the lump behind and then shaping the metal into coins... I actually did five large rocks and a load of small ones before I registered that the pile was far more than I needed or could carry by myself.
Film — Animated
- Justice League Dark: Apokolips War: After the Justice League assault on Apokolips fails, Darkseid sends three Reapers to Earth to extract its magma. The remaining heroes on Earth attempt to destroy the Reapers but fail and most are killed by the Paradooms defending the Reapers. Swamp Thing was able to destroy one Reaper after enough convincing by Constantine long after. Although Darkseid was defeated at the end, the Reapers have already done enough damage to the Earth extracting a lot of magma on top of other problems, prompting Constantine to convince The Flash to do another Cosmic Retcon to undo the damage.
Film — Live-Action
- Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country: lasers are used to mine dilithium by cutting away the rocks around it.
Literature
- Circle of Magic: Daja's Book: The magical living metal plants in the book possibly are an easy way to detect and extract what metal is underground.
- Earth Unaware: asteroid mining ships use laser drills to cut through asteroid crust to get to the valuable minerals.
- The Heroes of Olympus: Hazel Levesque was given the power to control "all the riches under the Earth" by her father Pluto at her mother, Marie Levesque's request. As a result, if she stays for too long in one place or experiences strong emotions, riches, like diamonds and gold, are summoned by her presence, and she can pull it up from the ground. However, because of the sheer power of the ability, it had to be counterbalanced by something - in her case, it was a curse that would bring misfortune to anyone other than hers if they tried to handle the riches.
- The Hyperboloid Of Engineer Garin: the eponymous Mad Scientist has a lot of gold because he used his laser-like Death Ray to drill deep beneath the Earth's crust, where there is apparently an entire geological layer composed of gold mixed with mercury.
- Inheritance Cycle: Brisingr: "Gifts of Gold": Eragon uses a lot of stamina to fuel a spell for gathering gold dust from underground, pulling it up, and shaping it into gold spheres.
- The Jedi Academy Trilogy: Qwi Xux, the inventor of the Death Star's planet-shattering superlaser and the World Devastators' self-replicating mobile factories, turns out to be an incredibly sheltered genius who believed they'd be used to break up dead planets for valuable minerals. The World Devastators actually do excel at mining via Tractor Beam, not that The Emperor cared much about that part.
- The Wheel of Time: One rare Talent in the One Power is "Delving", the ability to detect and extract metal ores from the earth. Magical Society in the Westlands doesn't involve itself in that work, but the Seanchan Empire highly prizes enslaved channelers who can Delve.
Tabletop Games
- Ars Magica: Transforming Mythic Europe explores Utility Magic with commercial applications, such as separating salt from seawater.
Video Games
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3: Getting raw materials for the war effort only requires putting down a refinery that will then send a truck to continuously extract ore from the mine.
- Deep Rock Galactic: asteroid mining's as easy as smashing valuable resources off the walls of a mine with a pick and dumping everything you can't carry yourself into Molly the M.U.L.E. Then it and the four dwarf team are carried off on a drop pod barely large enough for them. It's justified by the minerals being harvested being just that valuable, but the main challenge comes from the mines being overrun by hostile fauna, mainly Big Creepy-Crawlies.
- Dominions: The Riches From Beneath ritual is described as making rock so soft, ore can be carved out with a knife. As such, the spell will increase the gold and resources generated in the provinces under the caster's Dominion.
- Dyson Sphere Program: While the initial Mining Machine is a pretty standard drill-the-ground-to-escavate-ore device, the late-game Advanced Mining Machine is a high-tech monster that easily replaces 5-6 basic machines each, thanks to a bunch of Techno Babble that amounts to evaporating underground metal veins with lasers and then quantum-tunneling the resulting ore plasma to the surface for shipping.
- Empire Earth II: Oil and Uranium require structures to be build on top of them and then garrisoned by citizens to be harvested.
- Evolve Idle: Resource buildings start producing as soon as they're built, the only ones that require people are lumber, ores, and crafted material like bricks and plywood.
- Factorio: Miners can be placed instantly on resource patches to start extracting resources, all they need is power.
- Golden Treasure: The Great Green: the Shakestick is a treasure that, once understood, allows you to extract shiny things from stone effortlessly instead of having to put extreme effort into using your claws for the job.
- Hydroneer: When mining manually, the player shovels chunks of dirt from the ground into a bucket, then washes it in a sieve to obtain ore nuggets. However, mining machines do all of that automatically — and without actually removing any dirt! In other words, once placed (and as long as it's powered), a mining machine can just stand there, pounding the ground under it and producing an unlimited amount of ore.
- Mass Effect: Starting from Mass Effect 2, collecting resources is as easy as scanning a world from orbit and playing hot-and-cold with a metal detector, then launching a probe to collect them.
- Mecha BREAK:
- The Dismantle Extractors game mode tasks two teams to dismantle a number of Corite Extractors that are dropped at various points on the map. Failing to dismantle one on time causes a Corite Pulse Storm that damages nearby Strikers.
- Mashmak has Large and Medium Corite Extractors on the map that can be destroyed by the players. Failing to destroy the Large version in time will cause Corite Pulse Storms that will grow larger over time. While Large versions are in predetermined locations at the start, Medium versions are dropped at random points on the map later on similarly to the Dismantle Extractors game mode.
- PRAGMATA: The Lunum Mines has the LunaDigger, a massive mechanical Sand Worm used to dig up lunum from the moon. Due to being controlled by IDUS, it is hostile to Hugh and Diana, with the level ending with a boss fight against the machine.
- RimWorld: Regular colonists can chop down trees, mine stone and ore, harvest crops, and construct or deconstruct buildings with no apparent tools. The Biotech DLC adds a variety of genes that can improve a colonist's aptitude for certain tasks and mechanoids that are faster at harvesting specific resources.
- StarCraft: Every faction has a building (Terran Refinery, Protoss Assimilator, Zerg Extractor) it uses to allow its workers to harvest vespene. In StarCraft II's campaign, one Boring, but Practical upgrade automates the building to free up workers.
- In Total Annihilation and derived games Such as, your default method of resource production is placing Metal/Mass Extractors on top of deposits scattered around the map. They do require a bit of power to run, but they never run out of material to extract.
- Valorant: While radianite can be mined in traditional ways, the spike is a device that, upon detonation, extracts radianite from the environment inside the blast zone and shunts it to the world of its origin. The spike was first created by the Killjoy of Omega Earth's Valorant Legion to steal radianite from Alpha Earth; one was captured by Alpha's Valorant Protocol and reverse-engineered to bring radianite from Omega to Alpha. Now the two agencies are essentially warring with each other to bring radianite from one world to the other using spikes.
- Warcraft III:
- The Undead need to haunt Gold Mines before their Acolytes can start extracting gold from them. Said Acolytes extract gold magically so they don't need to physically be at the mines.
- Night Elves require a Tree of Life/Ages/Eternity to Entangle nearby Gold Mines to allow their Wisps to start gathering from them.
- Warframe:
- The Excavation game mode has players moving to random locations on the map to deploy, defend, and power Extractors. Should players successfully defend and power an Extractor for a sufficient amount of time, they will be rewarded with a random reward. Players will also receive a number of Cryotic whether or not the Extractor was successfully defended depending on the amount of time it was powered.
- Downplayed with Extractors; players can deploy Extractors to planets after completing a sufficient number of nodes on them but they take 4 to 8 hours to complete depending on the type. However, Extractors have the advantage of gathering resources even if the player is not playing the game.
- Xenoblade Chronicles X: A key part of exploring Mira is to set up data probes to help bolster the Frontier Nav system. The probes can then be programmed to function as a mining probe to gather Miranium and other resources from the immediate area. The mining process is never actually explained, and certain story missions has Team Elma checking out some broken probes and replacing them. The process involves taking a Skell to hold the probe steady while it burrows itself a few feet into the ground, and then a quick calibration on the computer.
Webcomics
- Awkward Zombie: Averted in Miner Inconveniences
, a parody of Mass Effect 2. Commander Shepard gleefully announces she found a platnium deposit for shotgun upgrades, only for Miranda to describe in detail all the steps they'd actually need to take to start mining, including applying for a mining license. She concludes it would take about five years before they can break ground.
- Grrl Power: One background character got rich off his geokinetic powers by summoning thousands of tons of gold from the Earth's mantle.