Infinite Ores makes every ore patch on every surface infinite. The number never goes down: the iron field you land on at spawn is still feeding your smelters a hundred hours later. Patches show a yield percent instead of an ore count, the way oil wells always have, and that percent is frozen forever at whatever richness the map generator handed out.
Shipped on the Factorio mod portal as my second Factorio mod, with two release lines built from one source tree: 0.1.x for Factorio 2.0 and 0.2.x for Factorio 2.1. Space Age is optional; where it is present, Vulcanus, Gleba, and Aquilo ores are infinite too.
Why it exists
Factorio’s ore patches are a timer. Every outpost you build is already dying, and the mid-game turns into a loop of prospecting, re-paving rail to the next field over, and tearing down drills you were proud of. I wanted the other version of that game: lay out a mining base once, run it until the rockets fly, and expand because a richer patch is out there, not because the ore under the smelters ran out.
What changes for your game
- Ore never runs out. Iron, copper, coal, stone, uranium: mine forever, by hand, by robot, or by drill.
- Patches show a yield % instead of an ore count. Infinite ore works like oil wells, and the percent is frozen at the patch’s natural richness. A starter field might read a few hundred percent; a distant mega-patch reads several thousand.
- Yield % is mining speed. The engine scales infinite-resource output by that percent, so a 4,000% patch does not just last forever, its drills run 40x faster. A scraped-out 19% remnant never dies either, but it crawls. Prospecting for rich fields finally pays.
- Build permanent mining bases. No outpost-hopping, no rail spaghetti chasing the next field.
- Drop it into an existing save. Patches simply stop depleting from that moment on, keeping whatever amount they had. Remove the mod and depletion goes right back to vanilla.
What stays vanilla
Crude oil and Space Age geysers already behave this way and are left untouched, yield curves and all. Everything else that ends up in the resource table, including ores from other mods, is covered automatically without a compatibility list.
Technical approach
The whole mod is a data-stage tweak with no runtime scripting, no per-tick cost, and no save bloat. At the final data-fixes stage, after every other mod has registered its resources, it walks the resource prototype table and, for anything not already infinite, flips the infinite flag, pins the minimum to the patch’s normal value, and zeroes the per-cycle depletion amount. That single change covers all three mining paths (player, robot, drill) because they read the same prototype fields. The 40x claim is measured, not inferred: on Factorio 2.0.77 with electric drills over 2,702 ticks, a 100% patch produced 22 ore and a 4,000% patch produced 880. Tooling lives outside the shipped zip: a Python preflight and packager build the two release lines, a PowerShell script deploys to the local mods folder, and the portal thumbnail is procedural SVG rendered to PNG so the art is reproducible from a seed.
On the mod portal
The portal listing files it under Tweaks with the Mining and Cheats tags, for Factorio 2.0 through 2.1. Two lines ship from the one source tree, 0.1.x for Factorio 2.0 and 0.2.x for Factorio 2.1, and the portal serves whichever matches the game. It is additive, so no vanilla prototype is replaced, and it is licensed All Rights Reserved with the source kept private. The art below is the portal thumbnail and its wide render: a glowing infinity over a low-poly ore field.
