How to Mine Regolith in The Crust

How to mine regolith in The Crust: scan the surface with an Ore Detector, park Extractors on the ore it marks, and send the output to a Regolith Refinery. The first bulk rock the factory eats is Regolith. Building names below come from the community wiki.gg list (last deep edit 2024) — verify in 1.0.

The Steam 1.0 page still describes the same job: mine the Moon, run factories above and below the surface, feed the colony. This page is only the mining step, not belts, colonists or drones.

What you are digging

Wiki.gg groups early minerals like this (names only, no yields published there):

• Regolith — the bulk lunar dirt.
• Water Ice — ice, not the same loop as rock.
• Oxides: Titanium Oxide, Iron Oxide, Silicon Oxide, Aluminum Oxide.
• Rare Earth Minerals.
• Slag as a processing leftover.
• Gases listed beside mining: Helium-3, Argon, Methane, Neon (several of those pages were stubs).

Do not treat that list as a recipe book. It is a vocabulary list. If 1.0 renamed a resource, believe the in-game tooltip.

Find the node: Ore Detector

The building list names an Ore Detector. Use it to mark what is under the regolith before you spam extractors on empty dust verify in current build.

A practical first pass:

1. Drop the detector where you want the first pit.
2. Read what it highlights. If it is ice, you want the ice machine, not the rock extractor.
3. Only then place extractors on the marked patch.

The store copy talks about mining above and below the surface. Underground deposits are real in the pitch; exact depth UI is not documented on the wiki snapshot verify in current build.

Extractors vs Ice Extractor vs Gas Extractor

Wiki.gg Buildings names three pullers:

• Extractor — the default ore puller for rock/oxides.
• Ice Extractor — ice / water ice, not interchangeable with the rock extractor.
• Gas Extractor — gases (Helium-3 and friends). Do not expect it to chew regolith.

If an extractor sits on the wrong node type it will idle. That is the usual first jam: ice machine on rock, or rock machine on ice.

Power for these machines is a separate page-worth of systems (solar, batteries, RTG, fuel generator on the same building list). This guide does not size power. If extractors are dark, check power before rebuilding the pit.

First refine: Single vs Multi Regolith Refinery

Raw regolith is not a finished part. The same snapshot names:

• Single Regolith Refinery
• Multi-Regolith Refinery
• Rare Minerals Refinery

Early oxides then show up as Steel, Silicon, Titanium, Aluminum on the Resources page. Ratios, craft times and 1.0 recipe changes are not on that wiki. Do not copy numbers from old EA videos without checking the 1.0 tooltip verify in current build.

A conservative first loop: one extractor → belt or drone → Single refinery. Unlock Multi when the pit is actually feeding more than one machine. Rare-earth is a later fork, not the first hour.

What this page will not do

It will not tell you how many extractors per refinery. Wiki.gg never published that, and inventing a ratio would break 1.0. It will not rank mining mods — Steam lists no Workshop for this game.

When 1.0 changes a name, fix this page from the tooltip, not from memory.