Genius is the gold in the mine;
talent is the miner who works and brings it out.
- Lady Marguerite Blessington
Mining allows you to extract the ore needed to make ingots for smiths, tinkers and carpenters. It also allows you to mine for granite to make stone furniture, sand to make glassblown items and helps treasure hunters find their hidden treasures more easily. It's an excellent money maker but also a very boring skill to raise.
Raising mining is simple and straightforward. Buy yourself a packhorse, get some fruits (apples, pears, peaches, grapes to feed it). Then hit the mines. Mining is very easy to raise at low levels so you don't have to start your miner with 50 mining. Keep that for harder skills like Blacksmithing or Carpentry. The advantage of starting a miner with 0 skill is that at lower levels, you will gain a lot of strength. That will come in handy later on as weight is a constant issue for miners. Once you've hit 60+ you always want to carry at least 5-10 shovels (not pickaxes) because you'll be breaking them faster and faster. If you don't have tinkering skills, travelling back and forth to town to buy more can be a real pain in the butt. I say buy shovels because they are lighter to carry but last just as long as pickaxes. Miners always have weight issues to deal with so travel light.
Once you hit 65, you will start getting colored ore. Those are the secret to GM quickly. You will gain faster if you mainly (if not only) mine the highest color ore your skill allows you to dig. At 65, you should focus on mining Dull Copper and ALWAYS smelt your highest ore one at the time. At that point, you can smelt the Iron in bulk. I suggest smelting your 2 highest ores one at the time. Many ore runebooks are now available. You should use them to recall from one specific vein color to the other. With bonded packhorses or beetles, it's even easier.
| Skill |
Ore You Can Extract |
| 0% |
Iron |
| 65% |
Dull Copper |
| 70% |
Shadow |
| 75% |
Copper |
| 80% |
Bronze |
| 85% |
Gold |
| 90% |
Agapite |
| 95% |
Verite |
| 99% |
Valorite |
| 100% |
Sand* / Granite* |
* See below Mining Specialization
Gaining up to 80 even 85 is fairly easy so unless you have good magery (or lots of money to spend on regs) I would stick with the normal mining method up to 80 and use recall mining for higher colors. However, I find that you gain more smelting than actually mining.
Mining Specialization
Digging up Sand (for Glassblowing) and Granite (for Stone Crafting) is a specilization of mining. You will not automatically get these resources when you reach GM level. In order to be able to extract them, you will need to read the book specific to each type of resource.
For Sand, you will have to read the book intitled "Finding Glass Quality Sand" and for Granite, the one called "Mining for Quality Stone". These specialization will not affect your skill cap as they do not require any skill points. These books can only be obtained from Gargoyle Shopkeepers that reside in Gargoyle City in Ilshenar. Each book costs a little over 10k.
Once you have read the book, it will disappear but the knowledge will remain with you. Note that once you have read the book on stone mining, you will continue to mine ore like you always have but whenever you go mining, you will from time to time get granite. For the occasional times when you do not wish to mine granite, click once on your shovel/pickaxe to get the context menu and select with mining mode you wish to use: ore only or ore & granite. You cannot set it to granite only. Since sand can only be mined on the beach or sandy areas, you will get nothing but sand when mining that specific resource.
Sand
Granite spawns in the same color as the ore color of any given vein. The chance of getting a specific colored granite is affected the same way getting colored ore from that vein is. For instance, when you're mining a valorite vein, you will get some iron and some valorite. If you happen to dig up a stone when you normally would have gotten iron, then the stone will be white. However, if you get the granite when you would have gotten valorite, then the stone will be blue.
Each granite weighs 10 stone and is not stackable so having a packhorse with you is highly recommended.
Sand also isn't stackable. The failure rate is fairly high but you get roughly the same amount of sand per 8x8 resource square as you get ore from an ore vein. The respawn time is also about the same as for ore, ie about 18 mins.
Special Items
With the BODs (Bulk Order Deeds), smiths are getting various rewards including sturdy pickaxes, sturdy shovels, mining gloves, gargoyle pickaxes and prospector's tools. The sturdy pickaxes and shovels are dull copper colored and allow you to mine an average of 180 ore, almost 4x as much ore are with a regular PC or NPC crafted shovel/pickaxe. This is very practical as you can carry a lot less shovels and still extract plenty of ore.
The mining gloves come in 3 types: leather blacksmith's glove of mining that grants you +1 mining skill, studded leather blacksmith's glove of mining that grants you +3 mining skill, and the ringmail blacksmith's glove of mining that grants you +5 mining skill. They come in various color and the leather ones are dyable. Their color does not affect the bonus. And even if you are GM, you will still benefit from the bonus (ie. have 101, 103 or 105 mining skills). The table below indicates your success rate smelting ore according to skill.
The gloves are particularly beneficial to non-GM miners training skills . Since you gain the most smelting your highest ore, you will gain even faster using the gloves on a non-GM miner to smelt ore 1 level higher than your actual skill without the gloves.
The gargoyle pickaxe allows you to extract ore one color higher than the one normally yielded by a vein. For instance, if you use it on a verite vein, you will obtain valorite. Beware though because at a given point, an ore elemental of the same color of the ore you are currently mining will spawn an come after you with a vengeance.
The prospector's tool is somewhat similar to the gargoyle pickaxe except no monster will spawn. You can use it on a vein and it will upgrade the vein to one ore color higher. You can then use a normal pickaxe or shovel on that vein and keep getting the upgraded ore. This is especially usefull because use in conjunction with the gargoyle pickaxe, you could benefit from a double upgrade. Lets say you use the prospector's tool on an agapite vein, it will turn into a verite vein. Now switch to your gargoyle pickaxe and you will get valorite. Note that you cannot use the prospector's tool more than once on the same vein for multiple upgrades. For instance, you cannot use the tool 2x on an agapite vein to get valorite. It will not go beyond verite.
The Powder of Fortification allows to restore a weapon to its original hit points. As you know, the more you repair a weapon, the less hit points it has and therefore, the less damage it does. Using this powder will restore it to its originally power and significantly increase the damage per successful hit.
