Mining

Main / Skills / Mining

Description

Mining is the skill of excavating rock shards and ore veins.

Characteristics gained

Body / Body strength, Body stamina Mind / Mind logic Soul / Soul strength

Method

Template:See also There are several "modes" of mining, depending on where and what you mine. The method is much the same for all of them: Activate a pickaxe, right-click the place to mine and select Mining -> (action).

Mining speed is determined by mining skill, pickaxe quality, pickaxe skill and the Wind of Ages cast, ordered from greatest effect to least.

Because Wurm is not a true 3D world, the cave layer is essentially a second world beneath the surface. It is possible to mine upwards and downwards with a few limitations.

• You may not mine upward out of rock and into the dirt that is covering it.
• You can mine downward until you reach the water table, but can not mine deeper than one tile level below water level.
• It is not possible to have one tunnel pass under or over another without forming a vertical shaft. Each tile is essentially a pillar, so if two tunnels cross at different elevations they create a shaft going from the upper tunnel to the lower tunnel. his can be useful when done intentionally. It can also ruin your mine if unplanned.

Planning your mine with an overhead view of your mine on graph paper can save you some heartache.

Opening a mine

The first step is to make a mine entrance on the surface which may be done on any cliff or rock tile.

The slope of the tile borders around the left and right of the required entrance are an important factor, too shallow of an opening and the entrance would be too steep to easily walk in and out of and may even prevent carts, horses or wagons from using the entrance. The slope on both sides should ideally be greater than 10 each to ensure that the entrance is easy to navigate. The good news is that a poor tunnel slopes can be fixed. The bad news is that it is a lot of work!

Activate a pickaxe and use the

RMB on the rock or cliff, select Mining > Tunnel.

After 51 tunnelling actions the message You will soon create an entrance will appear. A few actions later an entrance will be created, the exact number of actions is random; averaging around 5 mining actions after the message first appears.

• Tunnels can not be opened if the north-west corner is more than 4 dirts below water level.
• You cannot surface mine to correct an oddly shaped entrance so you must make sure to have the tile in the exact shape you want it to be before you open the mine.
• You may not open a mine entrance directly adjacent to another.

Tunnel excavation

Mining a cave wall inside of a mine will remove that tile of rock. It takes 45 mining actions to produce the message The wall will break soon, after which it takes average of 5 actions to fully remove the tile.

Activate a pickaxe and use the

RMB on the cave tile, select Mining > Mine.

• It is possible to mine up, down or flat but only the final action is taken into account. The resulting slope of up or down will be approximately 20.
• There are slight deviations in mine slopes (up to 1 "dirt") when a mine shaft progresses. The idea of "level" is actually between -1 and 1 slope.
• When connecting two mine shafts, the direction of the mining is irrelevant; one floor will connect to the other floor and ceilings will likewise connect.
• Each action will produce one rock shard.
• All items mined from the cave wall will appear in a pile on the ground on the tile you're stood, this often includes items such as salt and gems all of which are found randomly.

Ore mining

Ore is produced by mining on ore veins found inside of a mine. When an ore vein is depleted a tunnel is created the same as as when mining rock. However, a vein can take several thousand actions to deplete, so it is advised to mine around ore veins for tunnelling purposes. Shards may also be produced from marble and slate veins.

Activate a pickaxe and use the

RMB on the ore or shard tile, select Mining > Mine.

• Each action will produce one ore or shard of the vein's type on the floor in a pile where you are standing.

Tunnel exits

It is not possible to create an exit from a tunnel from the inside if there is dirt covering the planned exit, this must fully uncovered and bare just as if you were to create an entrance from outside.

Floor and ceiling mining

Mining the floor or ceiling of a cave does not create tunnels. Instead, it raises (for ceiling) or lowers (for floors) the cave. Note that, as with digging, these actions affect the closest corner of the tile and not the tile itself. A ceiling tile can be mined upward around 31 times before it is too high to reach (given that you haven't lowered the floor before you start). A floor tile can be mined down well past swimming depth to let boats such as Corbitas pass through. It is a good idea to keep a rowboat/sailboat close by for stamina regain when mining past the water level.

Activate a pickaxe and use the

RMB on the floor or ceiling tile, select Mining > Mine.

• When removing a rock tile adjacent to a section of the mine which has been modified as such it's important to know that the floor of the new section connecting the modified corners will match up (providing you didn't mine up or down), but the ceiling will not. The ceiling will take the standard height.
• You can fix slopes with Concrete: one concrete will raise one corner, the equivalent of 1 dirt or 1 mine action.
• Mining ceilings for rock shards is much faster than mining on a wall tile, this can be used to your advantage when not wishing to extend a mine, but shards are required.
• When mining the floor you can create uneven surfaces thus make it hard to move around on. For the best access in a mine it is recommended not to mine the floor directly unless you have a plan for it. The actions "mine up" and "mine down" create a predictable slopes of 20 and are good if you want a sloped passage, although floor mining can be very useful if used in the right way. Proceed caution when adjusting the floors as mining is not easily reversed. When digging you can always drop the dirt and refill the hole - this is not possible when mining.

Leveling

Standing on a flat cave tile will permit the levelling of an adjacent tile so that it will be at the same height. To see if a tile is flat simply activate a pickaxe and hover over the tile.

Activate a pickaxe and use the

RMB on the cave floor tile, select Mining > Level. In order to raise any corners concrete must be held in the inventory.

Surface mining

Main article: Surface mining

Surface mining is the action of shaping external rock or cliff faces to prepare an area for tunnelling, adjusting terrain for other uses or simply for aesthetic reasons. To mine on the surface all adjacent corners of the tile must be clear of dirt.

Activate a pickaxe and use the

RMB on the rock of cliff tile, select Mining > Mine. After anywhere between 1 and several actions a single dirt level of rock will be removed. Border slope depth may be seen with a pickaxe activated just as with a shovel.

Event message with slope change: You mine some rock shards.

Event message without slope change: You chip away at the rock.

Other information

Mine doors

Main article: Mine door

You can limit access to your mine with the use of a mine door. Several types of mine doors are available. Remember that off-deed mine doors can be bashed by other players, so your mine is not entirely safe just because it has a mine door attached. A deed perimeter does not protect mine doors.

• If you wish to place a fence around a mine entrance this should be done before attaching a mine door.

Dropshaft

Dropshafts are typically unfavourable in mines. They link two sections of a mine together which have a height difference of many dirts. They are not easily traversable. Vehicles and horses will not be able to move between the levels, and a player must climb to move between the two.

Should a dropshaft be required, simply mine out the rock tile which separates two mines of different levels. These are very hard, often impossible, to modify once created. Some players have created dropshafts to gain fast access to water or create short-cuts. There is no falling damage inside mines, so falling down these shafts is not going to injure the player.

Cave-ins

Any excavated cave tile has a chance of caving in. When this occurs the tile will become either a rock or ore/shard vein and will need to be re-excavated. A recently collapsed rock tile may not require as many actions to re-open, however an ore tile will likely require many hundred, or even thousand, actions to remove.

Reinforcing a cave wall with a support beam will lower the chance of a cave-in on tiles surrounding that support. Once reinforced they may not be excavated, however a mayor may mine out the support should it reside on their deed. This would take approximately 50 actions just to remove the support. Ore veins are considered similar to reinforced walls for purposes of stability.

• The chance that a tile is replaced with a vein or shard other than rock is extremely low.

Skillgain

Template:See also 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 by-product.

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 quality.

Optimal Skill Gain

Tile type	Skill
Rock	1-50
Iron	50-60
Copper	60-70
Tin, Zinc or Lead	70-85
Silver or Marble	90+

Resources

There are several types of resource which can be found while mining:

Resource	Vein / Tile	Crude	Refined
Copper	Copper vein	Copper ore	Copper lump
Gold	Gold vein	Gold ore	Gold lump
Iron	Iron vein	Iron ore	Iron lump
Lead	Lead vein	Lead ore	Lead lump
Silver	Silver vein	Silver ore	Silver lump
Tin	Tin vein	Tin ore	Tin lump
Zinc	Zinc vein	Zinc ore	Zinc lump
Slate	Slate wall	Slate shard	N/A
Marble	Marble wall	Marble shard	N/A
Rock	Rock tile	Rock shard	Stone cutting

Other resources which can be found include salt, gems, source crystals and flint.

For details about ore location, see prospecting.

See also

• Pickaxe
• Prospecting
• Support beam
• Stuck
• Mining warnings

Titles

• Miner at 50 skill
• Prime Minester at 70 skill
• Mastermine at 90 skill
• The World is Mine at 100 skill

Guides

• Mining guide
• Mining With Mamadarkness