What's better, a pickaxe or a mining drill?

[TK381]

Well, should I use a mining drill with a batpack which means I have to sacrifice a chestplate armor slot, or a ruby/emerald/saphire pickaxe with covalence dust? 1 iron ingot and 1 redstone make 40 covalence dust which means the pick can be repaired aprox 13 times, Should I use a mining drill or a pickaxe?

[minijack]

depends where you are in the game, i personally would go for a mining drill with a battery in hand to charge it when i need to, that way i don't have to lose a chest-piece!

[gavjenks]

Mining drills are certainly more invasive of your inventory slots, but they have the nice feature that they eat through dirt and gravel super fast, while picks do not.

There's no way to quantify that in equal terms, though. Just a matter of how annoying you find it to dig slowly through dirt, or to have to switch slots constantly to a shovel.

[warpspeed10]

What I found the be my favorite combo is in no way the most efficient or best for PvP. It is the most fun for me, personally. My standard kit is to wear quantum boots and legs for the added mobility and then either a lappack for my chainsaw and drill, an electric jet pack for flying around near home, or a fuel jet pack (with some extra buckets of fuel and a jet pack re-fueler) for long distance travel. By not wearing the quantum chest plate and playing on hard (what other difficulties are there? ) I am still at least partially vulnerable to mobs. This makes things like a wheat farm, as well as a computer controlled potion maker still useful. I do not wear a quantum helmet because I like the taste of my fine cuisine rather than the bland food packets my helmet deals out.

To directly answer your question though, the pickaxe is the way to go without the batpack or lappack since the drill runs out of power quite quickly. In addition, the chainsaw acts as an axe, shear, and diamond sword, so is worth carrying around over a normal sword.

P.S. I should probably add that I do not play with EE at all. I simply do not enjoy that mod.

[Xylord]

A pick with a few good enchants is much, much better than a mining drill. Efficiency is a must, and I usually try to have a good Fortune as well. I fancy Unbreaking too, but repairing items is one of the rare things I accept to use EE for, since the feature has been added to Vanilla MC.