Mining

Mining encompasses breaking walls in the course of exploring the world. Or, more specifically, to loot metal ore materials from blocks. Ore Boulders become a much more plentiful source of ore later in game progression, once Drills are available.

Skill Tree

Mining experience is gained by dealing mining damage to a wall with a pickaxe or melee hit (punch). Unbreakable walls, or those the player is not able to damage, will not award experience points. Walls that are broken too slowly will not award any experience.

Each mining skill level increases your mining damage by 1, for up to +100 at level 100. Every fifth level awards a skill point that can be allocated in the mining talent tree. Populating it from the top:

		Efficient excavation +2-10% mining damage
	Meticulous miner +5-25% chance to gain an additional ore from walls containing ores		Self-mending alloy Gain +2-10 durability on your tool when breaking walls containing ores
Miner's strength +2-10% of mining damage added as melee damage		Mine, mine, mine! +3-15% mining speed		Explosives engineer +4-20% explosives damage
	Pick and run! +4-20% movement speed boost for a short duration after mining a wall		Archaeologist +0.2-1% chance to drop a valuable item from any mined wall

Walls

Each wall type first deducts a flat amount of mining damage from each strike. Any damage beyond that threshold is then subtracted from the wall's health. So, with Grass walls, for example, a player will need to have a mining damage stat of over 166 before doing any damage to a wall with a pickaxe.

Striking a wall that is too tough to damage will made a different, gong-like sound, and knock the player back on the first hit.

Melee attacks on walls do not receive this deduction. So, players can always punch through any breakable wall, given sufficient time.

However, to gain experience from striking a wall, a player's mining damage must be 12 above a wall's damage reduction stat. Including for melee hits. So, 178 for grass walls.

Walls will begin to self-heal after taking no damage for 5 seconds.

Sprite	Name	Health	Mine damage reduction	Mine damage requirement threshold
	Dirt Block	135	1	13+ mining damage
	Turf Block	150	1	13+ mining damage
	Sand Block	8	1	13+ mining damage
	Meadow Block	150	1	13+ mining damage
	Clay Block	179	22	34+ mining damage
	Larva Hive Block	445	244	256+ mining damage
	Stone Block	300	55	67+ mining damage
	Dark Stone Block	300	55	67+ mining damage
	Grass Block	550	135	147+ mining damage
	Mold Block	706	660	672+ mining damage
	Beach Block	700	242	254+ mining damage
	Metropolis Block	892	1050	1062+ mining damage
	Desert Block	850	355	367+ mining damage
	Desert Temple Block	988	767	779+ mining damage
	Maze Block	988	895	907+ mining damage
	Lava Rock Block	1086	1224	1236+ mining damage
	Crystal Block	950	535	547+ mining damage
	Alien Tech Block	950	535	547+ mining damage
	Fossil Block	1415	1600	1612+ mining damage
	Obsidian Block	1812	9999999	10000011+ mining damage
	Oasis Block	850	1279	1291+ mining damage
	Excavation Block	1528	847	859+ mining damage
	Industrial Block	2778	2419	2431+ mining damage
	Tuff Block	1250	806	818+ mining damage
	Silicate Block	1631	9999999	10000011+ mining damage
	Void Infused Tuff Block	1667	1129	1141+ mining damage
	Snow Block	8	1	13+ mining damage
	Paintable Wall	150	1	13+ mining damage
	Wood Wall	150	1	13+ mining damage
	Eerie Wall	150	1	13+ mining damage
	Stone Bricks Wall	300	55	67+ mining damage
	Scarlet Wall	550	135	147+ mining damage
	Coral Wall	700	242	254+ mining damage
	Galaxite Wall	850	355	367+ mining damage
	Gleam Wood Wall	950	535	547+ mining damage
	Straw-bale Wall	150	1	13+ mining damage

Pickaxes

Main article: Pickaxes

Pickaxes are tools used for mining walls more efficiently than melee attacks. This is thanks to their substantial mining damage stats. However, bonus mining speed (e.g. with the Ancient Pickaxe) may be more useful than higher damage, against walls that take one hit, either way.

Sprite	Name	Mining damage	Durability	Acquisition
	Wood Pickaxe	15	200	Crafted by hand
	Copper Pickaxe	39	400	Crafted with Copper Workbench
	Tin Pickaxe	83	550	Crafted with Tin Workbench
	Iron Pickaxe	167	800	Crafted with Iron Workbench
	Scarlet Pickaxe	282	800	Crafted with Scarlet Workbench
	Ancient Pickaxe	354	800	Dropped by Azeos the Sky Titan
	Octarine Pickaxe	403	800	Crafted with Octarine Workbench
	Galaxite Pickaxe	556	800	Crafted with Galaxite Workbench
	Solarite Pickaxe	715	800	Crafted with Solarite Workbench
	Soul Seeker	769	Unbreakable	Crafted with Cipher Parchment

Skill Farming

Mining is significantly quicker to level up, since the 0.5.0 Desert update. However, these AFK strategies can still be used to speed progression. They both rely on hitting walls for 1xp per hit, not breaking them.

Punching on the spot

• Grab a stack of wall block items.
• Ensure character's mining skill, without pickaxe selected, is more than 12 higher than the damage reduction stat for that wall type (listed above).
• Surround character with walls, to be safe from mobs.
• Face sideways and hold down both use and attack buttons (LMB and RMB by defult - can be rebound).
• This should automatically place a new block each time you eventually break one by punching.
• Then, for an AFK session, either weight down your buttons, create a macro or use an auto-clicker program to keep these actions going indefinitely.
• Optimise character build for melee speed.

Minecart loop

• Place down Rail to create a loop of track greater than 80 tiles long.
• Aim for it to travel almost entirely horizontally or vertically (one or the other).
• Have a 1 tile gap in the middle, to fill with wall blocks.
• Also add blocks along the side you will be facing, at right angles to the plane of travel.
• So you can be punching these blocks most of the time, with only rare hits on the Minecart track, where it turns.
• The length will prevent the player from ever making successive hits on the same tile of track, within the 5 seconds before object damage self-heals.
• Make sure your mining damage is setup so you cannot one-hit your blocks.
• AFK with attack button held down, or other method of choice.
• Walls should never break, so don't need to be replaced.

Ore Boulders

Copper and Iron boulders in The Forgotten Ruins.

Ore Boulders are metal resource nodes 2x2 tiles in size. These rocks of solid ore can only be mined using Drills powered by Electricity Generators or Levers. They are unbreakable with pickaxes or other tools.

Each boulder always yields a total of 1800 ore of its respective metal type. This takes many hours to fully extract with 8 drills, and longer still with fewer than that. However, drills continue to work everywhere in the world, regardless of player distance.

Types and locations

Ore Boulders are environmental objects that are almost all spawned randomly by world generation, during player exploration and such. There is a far higher, or exclusive, chance for them to appear in their native biome areas. I.e. along with their manually mined ore types. Spawn chance tiers (in table below): "Frequent" = 1 in 333 tiles, "Common" = 1/1000, "Rare" = 1/2000, "Very Rare" = 1/10'000 (or less).

Biome	Copper	Tin	Iron	Gold	Scarlet	Octarine	Galaxite
Dirt	Frequent	None	None	None	None	None	None
Clay	Common	Frequent	None	Common	None	None	None
Stone	Common	Rare	Frequent	Common	None	None	None
Wilderness	Rare	Rare	Rare	Very Rare	Frequent	None	None
Sea	None	None	None	None	None	Frequent	None
Desert	Very Rare	Very Rare	Very Rare	Very Rare	None	None	Rare
Map color	#ad7466	#847b75	#888fa6	#c5bb66	#995f55	#7e68b7	#f7f0dc
Ore
Smelter
Smelt Time	7s	12s	17s	22s	27s	32s	32s
Bar
Bars/hour	514	300	212	164	133	113	113

The first 3 ore types can only be processed into bars with a Furnace. The next 3 ores with a Smelter Kiln and Galaxite with the Fury Forge. Each tier of ore takes 5 seconds longer to smelt than the type before, except Galaxite. This means that automated mining setups may need additional Smelters to keep up with the same rate of ore production from the higher tier boulders.

Depletion time

There is a diminishing return for each additional drill on a boulder, in terms of reducing the time per ore extracted. The effective amount of ore per drill drops from 27 per hour (with 1 drill) down to 15 per hour (with 8 drills). However, the total ore produced per boulder will always be 1800.

Drills	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
Ore Per Hour	27	49	64	82	95	103	109	116
Hours to Depletion	67.5	37	28	22	19	17.5	16.5	15.5

Graph showing how time to deplete ore boulders varies across different numbers of drills

Getting started

Each Drill requires 10Scarlet Bar and 10Iron Bar to craft, at the Automation Table. That is itself crafted at the Tin Workbench. So you will first need to manually mine enough Scarlet from Azeos' Wilderness, before making your first drill. 25 + 8 + 10 = 43 scarlet minimum, needed to make the first drill.

Illustration of different numbers of drills on a scarlet boulder

Priority should probably then be given to mining Scarlet boulders, to make more drills and increase production rate. Assuming one has easier, more plentiful access to Iron.

There are diminishing returns with the rate of ore production, from adding more drills to the same boulder. So, if you are very limited for drills, it may be faster to spread them out between different boulders.

One can collect raw ore from the drills directly (left and middle image), or use a more complex setup (right) to automate processing the ore into bars, ready for crafting. This is mostly a matter of preference. But automated processing means carrying more inventory items around, when setting up drilling sites.

Note: if you're not collecting periodically, your smelter/furnace output could fill up to 999, and stop. So, you'll need to add a second robot arm to unload finished metal bars from the smelter, into a chest.

The Wilderness is infinite in size, with every type of boulder below Octarine available, so one should never run out of ore.

Tips

Map Tool with all Boulder types in version 0.4.6 highlighted

1. Use Map Tool, like so, to highlight the location of boulders you've previous discovered. (Note that this will also spuriously highlight 2x2 patches of ore in walls.)
2. For automated setups, laying the Conveyor Belts backwards, from the end, avoids the need to re-orient multiple tiles of it.
3. Leave a one tile gap at the end, for the Robot Arm to pick up from. If an item is deposited right up onto its base, it can't pick it up.
4. Using 2 Electricity Generators, in opposite corners, can negate the need to carry any Electrical Wire. A trivial additional expense, after several different bolder types have been mined.
5. Boulder mining, and other automation stops running on dedicated servers when there are no players connected.

History

• Version 0.5.0.0 - Galaxite boulder added with The Desert of Beginnings.
• Version 0.4.3 - Boulders can now be destroyed by Ghorm running over them.
• Version 0.4.0 - Prior to this Sunken Sea update, boulders only produced 900 ore, maximum. And this would reduce to 450 ore with 8 drills. A behaviour unintended by the developers.
• Version 0.3.3 - The color of ore boulders has been made easier to see on the map.