Miner is the automated mining machine of Industrial Craft 2 that digs ore from the surface while the player never goes underground. Miner runs on low voltage — 32 EU/t maximum — stores 1000 EU internally, and spends roughly 1250–1350 EU per block broken. Drilling requires a Drill or a Diamond Drill (the Diamond Drill works about four times faster) plus Mining Pipe, which Miner consumes to extend the shaft and gives back when the Drill is pulled. Without a scanning module, Miner bores a plain 1×1 shaft straight down; a Scanner widens the sweep to every ore block in a 7×7 column, and an Advanced Scanner covers 13×13, leaving plain stone in the ground. The classic recipe assembles Miner from a Machine Block, a Chest, two Electronic Circuits and one Mining Pipe.

Ore and cobblestone rise into the 15-slot output buffer of Miner, and an Ejector Upgrade pushes the haul into an adjacent Chest for unattended overnight runs. Water and lava stop Miner until a Pump placed right next to the machine drains the liquid — the Pump keeps lava in its tank and discards water, though the Pump alone cannot cross an ocean, because source blocks regenerate faster than the Pump drains them. A Diamond Drill with an Advanced Scanner draws about 20–24 EU/t, against 2–3 EU/t for a basic Drill with a Scanner. Once the shaft is exhausted, Miner pulls the whole Mining Pipe column back when the Drill is removed, and a stack of cobblestone dropped into the pipe slot backfills the hole so no mob spawns in the drop shaft. Miner has done hands-off ore collection since the earliest IndustrialCraft builds, and the design still holds up in Industrial Craft 2 today.