Guides:Mining skillgain

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Different ore veins have different difficulties. The easiest is mining plain rock, followed by iron veins and copper veins. The hardest are silver and gold. As with most things in Wurm, too low difficulty leads to reduced skill gain, while too high difficulty results in high failure rate. A failure results in a 1.00 QL rock or ore.

Items from successful mining have random QL, but the maximum possible is the lower of your mining skill and the tile's inherent quality. See prospecting for details about tile QL.

Optimal Skill Gain

• Rock: 1-50
• Iron vein: 50-60
• Copper vein: 60-70
• Tin vein, Zinc vein, or Lead vein: 70-85
• Silver vein: 90-99

For the best skill gain, you will want to fail to mine the ore sometimes; about 10-15 failures (1QL) is the best skill gain. If you fail more, improve your pickaxe or downgrade an ore difficulty.

Note that if the tile is capped at a QL much lower than your skill you won't be able to check average QL of the pile of ore/shards to see whether or not you have a decent success rate. The average QL of the pile is always based on your skill and not the tile itself, and the tile QL is therefore irrelevant to skillgain. A wider range in upper QL based on skill will get lost when translated to the tile capped with lower QL so it will look like more top QL gains but in reality they would've been higher in QL if the tile was. For example: If you have 70 mining and you mine a QL32 rock tile and get 1xQL1 and 49xQL32 you don't actually get 49xHighest possible quality - the tile just doesn't go any higher so the ones that would've been in the range between 32-70 are all translated down to 32 due to the cap. The skillgain from a QL32 and a QL70 rock tile is exactly the same.

Note: Never mine gold for skill; it is a waste of materials and time. You have less than the optimal skill gain % chance to get ore-QL > 1/2 skill.

Note: You will need to adjust your pickaxe quality to stay at the line of optimal %chance success. For the most part, 20-30QL pickaxe will work for skill gain.

More details on mining skillgain

First Rule of mining skillgain: The only thing that matters for skillgain PER SKILL TICK is sleep bonus, the time spent on the action, and the Circle of Cunning enchantment (if any) of your pick. Yes, your skill level impacts this as well, but if you are an X skill miner, your skillgain per hit will be Y, no matter what you mine on, unless you change the timer of the mining action, the CoC on the pick, or activate sleep bonus.

• TEST*

QL 28.5ish pick with CoC 65

Skill 64.2-64.3

No Sleep Bonus. Unwounded status except where noted specifically below.

Rock, Normal Quality, skill gain per 1.01-39.99 = 0.00262

Iron, Very Good, skill gain per 1.01-39.99 hit = 0.00262

Zinc, Very Good, skill gain per 1.01-39.99 hit = 0.00262

Lead, poor (22), skill gain per 1.01-22 hit = 0.00262 (For the lead, note that you cannot see 22-39.99 hits because they are capped as 22. You also cannot see what would normally have been 40+)

Tin, Very Good, skill gain per 1.01-39.99 hit = 0.00262

Copper, Normal Quality, skill gain per 1.01-39.99 = 0.00262

With a single very light wound, generated skillgains of 0.00270 on the copper, tin, and rock tests. The wound increased mining timer slightly.

Second rule of mining skillgain: When mining inside mines, on walls, you will only get skillgains if you generate rock or ore between QL 1.01 and 39.99.

A) This rule does *NOT* hold for surface mining or tunneling.

B) It MAY not hold for mining straight up or straight down in mines. I'm pretty sure the skillgain calculations for mining ceilings or floors are different. ((I was slack and did not test this.))

C) It MAY not hold for miners with skill less than 50 (tested at 64 skill)

• SPECIAL NOTE - Apparently the quality of the ore or rock you generate is *initially* calculated without consideration to the QL of the tile - the quality of the vein is compared to the quality of your hit. If your hit quality is higher than the QL of the tile, then it is revised downwards to the QL of the tile. See the first example above. I was getting lead hits at maximum possible QL for the vein, but they were giving me skill only sometimes. I've seen the same thing happen with other ores with less than 40 QL, but until recently I never put it together how it had to be working.

A) QL=1 is a critical failure and gives you no skill

B) QL>39.99 is too good of a success, and you get no skill

C) Veins or rock tiles with less than 40 QL can give skillgain even if you max their QL, but it's harder to judge based on your pile what sort of success rate you are achieving because the max QL of the tile masks the actual quality of your hits.

Third rule of mining skillgain: Your mining skill level, pick quality and pick enchantments are critical to your choice of what ore you mine.

In order to fully optimize your skillgain, you need the lowest possible quality pick which will allow you to frequently create ore or rock (in a mine) between 1.01 and 39.99 quality. Each mine-able substance has a different base difficulty. The lowest being rock, then iron, etc. A combination of your skill and your pick's quality will be compared against the dificulty of what you are mining in order to determine the "curve" of skillgain.

In other words, it is possible to adjust your skillgain by varying the quality of your pick. A higher quality pick on iron might end up generating just as much skillgain as a lower quality pick on rock because you are hitting for skillgain more often, even if you are getting a bit less skill per each skill tick (because the higher quality pick is faster). If you mine on iron at 64 skill with an 80 QL pick, you will very rarely ever get a skillgain tick. With a 28.5 QL skiller pick, you get more frequent skillgains. On lead, at 64 mining with a 28.5 QL pick, you will be constantly failing with "1" results that give no skillgain. With a higher quality pick you will get more skillups.

Another consideration: A quality 30ish pick is going to maintain it's status and it's enchantment FAR better than a QL 10 pick will, and a QL 1 pick will poof if you aren't very careful watching your pick's damage level.

So the most efficient method for mining skillgain would *probably* be to acquire a QL30-ish steel pick (steel takes 20% less damage per action) with very high Circle of Cunning enchantment and jump on some high QL ores until you determine which types of ores give you the most hits between 1.01 and 39.99 QL, then find a horrible trash QL version of that ore and go to town mining it.

If your skilling pick is also your everyday use pick, then look around and experiment on different ores that you have access to, again looking for an ore type that you generate a lot of hits between 1.01 and 39.99 quality