Tekkit Lite Tutorial - Episode 7: High Efficiency Mining
Channel: TekkitLiteTutorial
Date: 23/04/2013

This tutorial goes over high efficiency (HE) mining as it occurs in its primarily vanilla form. This represents a short, intermediate stage of mining between caving and automated quarries. In this video, I cover a basic HE mining scheme that is easy to remember and explain before tossing it away and saying "go to town" with the mining laser and demonstrate that.
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Tekkit has a natural progression of mining. You start off caving and move on to high efficiency mining as your material demands outpace your caving rate. High efficiency mining is the solution to this and it is exactly what its name implies: mining efficiently. This means that the number of blocks you find relative to the number of blocks you dig up is relatively high. Using HE-mining, particularly with some of the tekkit tools, you can acquire materials 3-9 times faster (depending on if you are in the overworld or nether) relative to caving. So it's a good investment of your time, albeit much less interesting.

There are many patterns for high efficiency mining available on the minecraft wiki if you want to see more examples than the one I give.

Expect the next episode to be a 10-15 minute tutorial on HE mining in the nether.