Guides:Mining Skill Tips

Note: This article is the opinion or suggestion of one or more players. Information in player-made guides are not maintained by the Wurmpedia staff. It is subject to player opinions, and information may not be factually accurate or up-to-date. For updated game mechanics information, check the main namespace articles.

Mining Skill Tips

To gain more mining skill, you will want a relatively low ql pickaxe with as much Circle of Cunning on it as possible. This will give a lot of skill if you mine rock shards with it, as it heightens the difficulty and increases the mine time. It is the increased mine time that improves the skill gain in mining: longer mine time = more skill. #

Mining rock shards is easier for a new player up to a decent skill level (up to 50), but from then on if you want to grind mining I would suggest mining on an ore vein. Try to skill on the following veins according to your skill level;

Optimal Skill Gain

The "Optimal Skill Gain" list seems outdated / incorrect. Please see https://www.wurmpedia.com/index.php/Mining#Skillgain

• 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.

You want to mine shards or ore about half of your actual skill, so say you have 50 mining, you want to be mining 25 ql rocks or ore. This means you have a 50% chance of mining a full ql (your mining skill) and failing (1 ql). Try to not mine capped walls lower than your skill.

# There is actually some disagreement about this. Some people are of the opinion that the extra mining actions with a fast pickaxe make up for the loss of skillgain due to short timers. There is also a third camp which believes that it makes little difference which method you prefer and that skillgain will be about the same if you spend the same total amount of time mining. If this is the case, then how many shards or how much ore you want at the end of your mining session might be more important.