Mine a Planet Tier List: What to Upgrade First

How to read this tier list

Mine a Planet is an idle laser-drone mining simulator on Roblox where your income comes from drones completing mine-and-deliver cycles. This tier list does not rank individual drone cosmetics or chase ultra-rare rolls. Instead, it ranks upgrade roles — mining power, cargo capacity, and travel speed — based on which bottleneck is slowing your cash flow right now.

Think of your fleet as a pipeline. Mining power controls how fast ore leaves the ground. Cargo controls how much value each trip carries. Speed controls how often trips finish. When one link is weaker than the others, pouring resources into the already-strong link wastes money. The tiers below tell you which role deserves your next investment at each stage of the game.

Official sources mention astronomically rare drones — on the order of one in twenty-five trillion — but no public odds table exists. Chasing those rolls is entertainment, not a progression plan. Sustainable growth comes from fixing bottlenecks with fleet upgrades, planet evolution, and steady play sessions.

S-tier priorities (always relevant)

S-tier investments are the upgrades that never stop paying off because they attack the core idle loop directly. Fleet-wide mining power remains S-tier whenever ore extraction is the limiting step — you see lasers active but payouts feel small relative to time spent. Cargo jumps to S-tier the moment drones return empty-handed while ore piles up uncollected, or when trip value plateaus despite higher mining output.

Speed earns S-tier when cycle time dominates your income math: drones spend most of their time in transit rather than mining or unloading. In practice, early sessions skew toward mining power, mid-game often shifts to cargo, and speed becomes critical once baseline stats are healthy.

• Mining power — best when extraction is slow or ore tiers outpace laser strength
• Cargo — best when drones cap out before the deposit is emptied
• Speed — best when round-trip delay eats most of each cycle

Phase-based tier shifts

Early game (first planet layers): Mining power sits at S-tier because weak lasers extend every dig phase. Cargo is A-tier — helpful but rarely the first wall. Speed is B-tier until you own multiple drones, because a single slow drone still benefits more from stronger mining than marginal travel gains.

Mid game (multiple drones, evolving planet): Cargo rises to S-tier as parallel drones compete for the same deposits. Mining power stays A-tier to keep pace with harder ore. Speed moves to A-tier because fleet-wide downtime compounds across every drone.

Late game (high evolution, long offline sessions): All three stats matter, but the lowest relative stat becomes S-tier by definition. Offline income amplifies whatever cycle rate you achieve while active, so balanced fleets outperform lopsided ones. Speed and cargo often decide how much of that active efficiency carries into offline payouts.

C-tier and D-tier traps

C-tier: Chasing rare drone rolls before fixing fleet bottlenecks. Free rolls are worth using, but spending premium currency purely for rarity when mining power is still low yields little measurable income gain. Treat rolls as bonus variance, not your primary upgrade path.

C-tier: Maxing one stat while ignoring the other two. A hyper-fast drone with tiny cargo and weak mining completes many empty-feeling trips. A heavy cargo drone that mines slowly still underperforms a balanced fleet.

D-tier: Copying another player's build without checking your own bottleneck. Streamers may emphasize speed because their account already solved mining and cargo. Your account may need the opposite.

Quick bottleneck diagnosis

Watch one full drone cycle without speeding up time. Note where the drone idles longest: at the rock face, in transit, or waiting to deposit. That idle segment points to your S-tier upgrade for the next purchase.

If every drone finishes trips at similar times but income still feels low, compare trip value (cargo × ore value) against trip frequency (speed). Low value per trip means cargo or mining power. Low trips per hour means speed.

Use the drone income calculator on this wiki with your real in-game numbers — not example values — to see whether raising cargo, speed, or mining multiplier moves hourly cash more. The stat that moves the needle most is your personal S-tier.