Minions
Minions
Small automated workers you place in the world to process materials for you, no crafting bench required once they're set up.
Last updated August 2026. Part of the VortexXtra Item Catalog. See also: Materials & Components for how to craft each minion.
Placing & Using a Minion
Right-click to place one down, and it appears as a small, harmless figure wearing a themed skull and colored chestplate, with a floating name tag above it showing what it's doing.
Right-click the minion itself to open its interface:
- 9 input slots on the left, drop in whatever raw material you want processed.
- 9 output slots on the right, collect finished goods here (you can only take items out, never place items in).
- A progress display in the center showing how far along the current job is, or "Output Full" if you need to come empty its output first.
There's no range or line-of-sight requirement, most minions only care about what's physically inside their own input slots. If several outputs are possible from the same input, one is picked at random.
Want to move one? Hit it empty-handed, or use the Pick Up Minion button inside its menu. Either way it drops itself plus everything stored inside, ready to replant elsewhere.
Minions keep working even while you're offline, and pause automatically if their chunk unloads, picking back up once it loads again.
The 11 Minion Types
Most minions work the same way, feed in a raw material, wait a few seconds, collect the result. Here's what each one specializes in:
| Minion | What It Does |
| Sifter | Sifts loose materials like sand and gravel into salt, nuggets, and flint, and turns sifted ore into raw metal dusts. |
| Chopper | The fastest minion by far, chops any log into planks, and any planks into sticks. |
| Grindstone | Grinds items down, blaze rods into powder, stone into gravel, wheat into flour, and downgrades magical/ender lumps a tier at a time. |
| Smelter | Turns metal dusts into ingots, and handles the deep alloy chain, everything up through Reinforced Alloy. The most complex and slowest processor of the bunch. |
| Panning | Pans gravel and soul sand/soil for random treasure, nuggets, flint, quartz, blaze powder, and more. |
| Ore Crusher | Bulk-processes stone and vanilla ores in large batches, boosts ore yields, and refines the Uranium chain up from Tiny Piles. |
| Compressor | Compresses small items into blocks (9 nuggets into an ingot, 9 ingots into a block), and grows magical/ender lumps up a tier. |
| Pressure Chamber | The slow, high-value refinery, carbon into Compressed Carbon, and eventually into Synthetic Diamonds and Carbonado. |
| Chunk Miner | Automatically mines every ore in its entire chunk for you, no digging required, fed by coal or uranium-tier fuel. |
| Oil Driller | Drills for crude oil hidden in the chunk it's placed in, output speed depends on how much oil that chunk actually has. |
| Refinery | A one-trick machine, turns Buckets of Oil into Buckets of Fuel. |
Chunk Miner: How It Works
This one's different from the rest. Instead of needing raw materials, it needs fuel, coal, charcoal, oil, refined fuel, or a tier of uranium, each giving it a set amount of mining power. Once fueled, it scans its entire chunk for ore and mines it directly out of the world for you, roughly one ore every 10 seconds regardless of type. Better fuel just means it can mine more before running dry, it doesn't mine any faster.
Oil Driller: How It Works
Each chunk secretly has its own oil reserve, ranging from nothing at all up to a rare infinite deposit. The first time you drill in a chunk, that reserve gets locked in, most chunks have little to none, but a lucky one can produce steadily for a long time. Like the Chunk Miner, it needs fuel to run, and higher oil levels mean noticeably faster production, from roughly one bucket every few minutes on a poor chunk, down to one every 10 seconds on the rarest deposits.
A Few Notes
- There are no upgrade tiers for minions themselves, each type runs at a fixed speed forever. If you want more throughput, place more of them.
- Better fuel doesn't speed up a Chunk Miner or Oil Driller, it just lets them run longer before needing to be refueled.
- No placement limit exists, place as many as you'd like across your builds.