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).

Because Wurm is not a true 3D world, the cave layer is essentially a second world beneath the surface world. 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 also 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 in all mines is to make a mine entrance on the surface. This can be done on any cliff or rock tile. Equip a mining pick, and select the "Tunnel" option. After 51 tunneling actions, the message "You will soon create an entrance" will appear. A few actions later an entrance will be created. The exact value is random, averaging around 5 mining actions after the message appears.

Tunneling on a shallow slope is dangerous since you are basically mining straight down and may dig yourself into a steep slope or a pit. A slope of 10+ is probably safe (estimate). The good news is that a poor tunnel slopes can be fixed. The bad news is that it is a lot of work!

Tunnels can not be opened if the northwest corner is more than 4 dirts below water level.

Opening a ship tunnel

Look for a rock tile that is approximately two-thirds below the waterline. Needing to dredge such a tile is not unusual, especially to make the surrounding terrain look natural for those concealed ship docks.

The important thing is not to tunnel the ship entrance from the surface. You mine to the surface from inside, thus leaving an opening deep enough to sail through.

How you get inside doesnt matter. Everything ranging from alternative entries to making temp openings and collapsing them with orbs works. All that matters is you mine the cave floor deep enough and then mine straight out. Just make sure you have some means of restoring stamina nearby.

Even if you get the entrance wrong on the first try. Do not worry. Simply collapse the tile with an orb or Mag priest and try again.

Sculpting wand is also something to look into if you can`t find a tile.

Note: You can tunnel at 0 stamina while climbing but a boat close by for stamina regain is recommended as its slow.

Surface mining

The slope of surface rock (or mining tunnel rock) can be changed with a pickaxe or a sculpting wand. The sculpting wand is the fastest way to shape rock. Using a pickaxe is time consuming but possible as only 1 in 5 mining actions will lower the rock. Here's a step-by-step on how to do this:

1) Clear a square of four tiles all the way down to rock in order to lower the rock at the point where those four tiles intersect. To clear all the dirt off a single rock tile, you must dig down to rock on all four corners. You will know that you have hit rock by watching event messages for messages that indicate you are hitting rock. You will also cease collecting dirt in inventory when you start hitting rock. Example: If you want to lower rock at point E, you will have to dig down to rock at all points A through I. Points A/B/E/D will clear the top left square, B/C/F/E will clear the top right, etc, etc.

A--B--C | | | D--E--F | | | G--H--I

2) Activate your mining pick and stand at the intersection of the four tiles (point E), click the ground, and select the mining action. Be sure that you do not select tunneling. Tunneling will eventually create a mine entrance, which we do not want (at least not yet).

3) Randomly, with a 20% chance, you will drop the rock level at the point where you are mining by 1 dirt and produce a rock shard. This is not cumulative. Sometimes you will drop the rock level very quickly for a short spurt, other times you might mine for along time not drop the level. In other words, many failures in a row does not make future success more likely.

4) Attempting to lower surface rock below the ceiling of a mine below results in the message "The rock sounds hollow, you will need to tunnel to continue". At this point, you cannot lower the surface rock any further.

Note that the example above is only for one point. To lower the face of a tile to make a nice mine entry tunnel, here's a more complex example: After prospecting tile B/C/G/F to create a tunnel there to start a mine, the slope is just not right. Drop corners F and G to make a nice slope for the mine entrance. To drop the rock level at F dig A/B/C/E/F/G/I/J/K down to rock. To drop the rock level at G dig B/C/D/F/G/H/J/K/L down to rock. Remember: surface rock lowering is done at intersections of rock tiles, tunnel creation is done within a single rock tile. If you try to tunnel while standing at a intersection of 4 tiles, you might get a tunnel at an unexpected location, so be sure to be standing on one tile, and be sure to be clicking that one tile when creating a tunnel.

A--B--C--D | | | | E--F--G--H | | | | I--J--K--L

Surface mining will produce rock shards on each action that lowered the corner.

Slopes created with surface mining are limited to 3x mining skill on PvE and 1x mining skill on PvP. Be careful as its possible to surface mine a slope's steepness one mine action beyond what your skill will allow. This small mistake prevents any mining actions on top of the slope.

Mine doors

You can limit access to your mine with the use of a mine door. Several types of mine doors are available.
Remember that offdeed minedoors can be bashed, so your mine is not entirely safe just because it has a mine door attached. Perimeter does not protect mine doors.

Walls can be built around any slope of tunnel entrance by standing within the mine and selecting the tile borders. Note that you should build these walls before placing a mine door if you wish to install one aswell.

Tunnel Excavation

Mining a cave wall inside a mine will create a tunnel further into the mine. It takes 45 mining actions to produce the message "The wall will break soon", after which it takes average 5 actions to open the tunnel.

Dropshaft

To create a dropshaft, mine a tile that is either above or below a tile that has already been dug out.

Primary uses of dropshafts are fast travel from one level of a mine to a lower level.

For example, if you dig down to water level to get a source of water, you can create a water-filled cave and mine out over that cave to get a dropshaft that takes you straight down to the water.

There is no falling damage inside mines.

I do not recommend doing this as it ruins the structure of the mine. Making some parts unstable thus making it unable to be mined.

Tunnel exits

• You cannot mine out from a tunnel if the tile outside has dirt on it.
• You can mine out from a tunnel if the tile outside is bare rock.

Ore mining

Ore is produced by mining ore veins found inside a mine. When an ore vein is depleted, a tunnel is created as when tunnel mining. However, a vein can take several thousand actions to deplete, so it is advised to mine around ore veins for tunneling purposes.

Each action will produce one ore of the vein's type.

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 downward all the way to a bit below the water level.

Excavating a new tile from a tile that has a raised ceiling will not create a new tile with the same ceiling height as the adjacent: the new tile will have the standard ceiling height for cave tiles. However, if you have lowered the floor you might excavate a new tile at the same floor level. If you have mined down the two floor corners that are in contact with the wall you mine down the floor will stay at that level (the ceiling will still have standard height, but at the new level). This is very useful for making tunnels, for example for boats, as you only have to reach the wished floor level on the first tile and the rest will go along in accordance to it.

Please note that when mining the floor you can create uneven surfaces thus make it hard to move around in your mine. 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 somewhat 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 floor excavations with caution as the mining is not easily reversed. When digging you can always drop the dirt and refill the hole - this is not possible when mining.

You can fix slopes with Concrete: one concrete will raise one corner, the equivalent of 1 dirt, (or 1 mine action.)

It's advised that you mine cave ceilings when in need of rock shards, since it's faster than mining cave walls.

Cave-ins

Any excavated cave tile has a chance of caving in. When this happens, the tile is simply returned to its former non-excavated state and can be excavated again. If you mine a tile soon after it collapses, it won't need as many mine actions as usual to re-open. Ore veins may appear in cave-ins.

Reinforcing a cave wall with a support beam lowers the chance of cave-ins, but reinforced walls cannot be excavated, but they can be mined. Ore veins are said to count as reinforced for purposes of stability.

Note: The only cave-ins/tile collapse that I have seen are those next to other unmined tiles. For example: If you mine a three (3) tile wide path, the center tile won't cave in but the outter tiles will have a chance to cave in...

Other considerations

You can either mine "up", "down" or level when mining a tile. Only the last mining action is relevant to determine the direction the mine shaft will take. Mining up or down represents the equivalent of a 20 dirt slope.

There are slight deviations in slope (up to 1 "dirt") when a mine shaft progresses. So, "level" is actually 0 slope, 1, or -1. Note that 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.

Tips

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

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 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 or Marble wall: 90-99

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 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

Guides

• Mining guide