Mining
Description
Mining is the skill of excavating rock and ore veins. The act of mining increases several characteristics: body strength, body stamina, mind logic and soul strength.
Method
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).
Remember that Wurm is a 2D world. The cave layer is essentially a second world beneath the surface world. It is possible to mine upwards and downwards as long as you don't reach the surface or the water table. However, it is impossible to have one tunnel go above or below another. Each tile is essentially a pillar, so if two tunnels meet they create a shaft going from the upper tunnel to the lower tunnel.
Surface excavation
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. Surface mining is fairly quick compared to tunnel and ore mining. After 51 mining 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.
Surface excavation will produce rock shards on some actions. The probability seems to be around 25%.
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.
Tunnel excavation produces rock shards on every action.
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.
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 or mined. Ore veins are said to count as reinforced for purposes of stability.
Skill and difficulty
Different ore veins have different difficulty. The easiest is mining plain rock, followed by iron ore and copper ore. The hardest are silver and gold. As with most things in Wurm, too low difficulty leads to reduced skillgain, 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.
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 deviation 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.
Warning messages
Note: Some of these messages aren't exactly as presented in-game. Feel free to correct the wording.
Sometimes you will be unable to continue mining and presented with a warning message.
- The iron pickaxe gets stuck in the rock.
- This one is a basic anti-macro measure. Move around a bit and you will free your pickaxe. Until then you will be unable to perform further mining actions.
- You have to move to free your pickaxe. It is stuck.
- This means you didn't move around enough after getting the preceding message.
- You fail to produce anything here. The rock is stone hard.
- Occurs on the surface. This means the tile you are attempting to excavate is actually an ore vein. There's nothing to do about it, you simply have to make your entrance on another tile. Note that if you make the entrance one tile below the vein, the tunnel will open right into the vein and cannot be extended until the vein is depleted.
- The ground sounds strangely hollow and brittle. You have to abandon the mining operation.
- Occurs on the surface. This means there's already a tunnel on the tile you're trying to excavate. There's nothing to do about it, you simply have to make your entrance on another tile. Or you could search for the entrance (possibly caved in) to the existing tunnel.
- ? A dangerous side shaft will appear.
- Occurs inside a mine. This message appears when the tile you are excavating shares a single corner with an existing tunnel. To excavate it you must first excavate so the target tile shares an entire wall with the other tunnel. See example on the right.
- The cave walls look very unstable. You cannot keep mining here.
- Occurs inside a mine. Exact cause unknown, it happens when mining close to the top of the rock layer, and can sometimes be avoided by mining downwards.
- You hear falling rocks on the other side of the wall. A deep shaft will probably emerge.
- Occurs inside a mine. Caused when there is already another mine nearby, but there is too much of a height difference to connect the two mines.
Other: "Dirt will flow in" has not been seen lately, it may have been replaced by "The cave walls look very unstable". There's also a message for attempting to mine underwater, text unknown.
- There is no space to mine here. Please clear the area before continuing.
- Occurs when the tile you're standing on has 100 items on. Move a few objects and you can continue.
Ore veins
There are several types of ore which can be found while mining.
For details about ore location, see prospecting.
