Mining

Main / Skills / Mining

Description

Mining is the skill of excavating rock shards 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).

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.

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. 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!

Sculpting wands, if you have access to one, are the fastest way to shape rock.

You can now change the slope of surface rock with a mining pick. It is time consuming, but possible. 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:

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

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.

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) Roughly once per every 10 mining actions, according to recent notes, you will drop the rock level at the point where you are mining by 1 dirt. This does not appear to be a cumulative chance. Sometimes you will drop the rock level very quickly for a short spurt, other times you might mine 25 times and not drop the level. In other words, many failures in a row does not make future success more likely.

4) Surface mining is reported to allow you to lower surface rock below the level of existing tunnels underground. It would be good to get some additional confirmation of this, though I am rather certain that at one of my personal surface lowering locations, I did precisely that, lowering the level of rock to a point below where it should have broken through into a tunnel. Remember Wurm is not truly 3D.

5) *needs more input* Lowering surface rock with a pick may be more successful in the daytime than at night. A campfire at night does seem to help. I might just have had several very long strings of failures at night and many quick successes in the daytime by sheer luck. My (whose?) experience was over a period of probably 8 or 9 Wurm day/night cycles. Not enough to be truly sure, but enough to make me doubt coincidence.

Note that the example above is only for one point. If you want to lower the face of a tile to make a nice mine entry tunnel, here's a more complex example:

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

You have prospected on tile B/C/G/F and want to create a tunnel there to start a mine, but the slope is just not right.

You want to drop corners F and G to make a nice slope for your mine entrance.

To drop the rock level at F you need to dig A/B/C/E/F/G/I/J/K down to rock.

To drop the rock level at G you need to 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.

Surface excavation will produce rock shards on some actions. The probability seems to be around 25%.

Mine doors

You can limit access to your mine with the use of a mine door. Several types of mine doors are available.

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.

Dropshaft

To create a dropshaft, you need to 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.

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.

Thanks, Kediec, for that info.

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 approximately 40-50 times before it is too high to reach. A floor tile can be mined downward a maximum of ?? times. Excavating a new tile from a tile that has raised ceiling or lowered floor does not open at those levels. The new tile will be standard height with the the ceiling and floor sloping as appropriate.

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.

Optimal Skill Gain

• Rock 1-50
• Iron 50-60
• Copper 60-70
• Tin or lead 70-85
• Silver 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: 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.

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.

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.

Side shaft example

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 best course of action at this point would probably be to mine out a rock dile next to the one you get this message on.

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 crack is starting to form on the floor. You will have to find another way. The cave shudders from some imbalance. 

Think it is caused by undermining previous tile mined above. No fix though mining another wall and therefore changing tunnel direction, on same tile worked.

 ? The cave wall sounds hollow. 

Appears when you are mining into another mine shaft and the height difference is not dangerous.

 ? 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.

The cave walls look very unstable and dirt flows in. You would be buried alive.

Occurs inside a mine. Happens when the tile you are mining on will break out to the surface, but the surface is not exposed rock. To excavate it, you must first expose the rock on the surface.

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.

The topology here makes it impossible to mine in a good way. 

Occurs when trying to create a mine entrance on a perfectly flat rock tile. Lower at least 1 corner with surface mining to continue.

Ore veins

There are several types of ore which can be found while mining.

• Iron ore
• Copper ore
• Gold ore
• Silver ore
• Lead ore
• Tin ore
• Zinc ore

For details about ore location, see prospecting.

See also

• Pickaxe
• Prospecting
• Support Beam
• Stuck

Titles

• Miner at 50 skill
• Prime Minester at 70 skill
• Mastermine at 90 skill

Guides

Mining Guide