Mining Guide

Mining, being the first skill you will see in the game, means it is as simple as this game can get.

Gear and Enchants

• The 3 pieces of the Mining armor set, Miners's lantern helmet, Miner's smock, and Miners's trousers
• One of the baseline metal Pickaxes or a Dwarven Rocksmasher
• A necklace with Gathering (idealy Dwarven necklace as it gives mining levels)
• A ring with Haste (Prismatic ring gives gathering stats so idealy you have one of these)
• Boots or Gloves with Naturalist(This is the most important enchant for boots/gloves)
• Boots or Gloves with any of the following enchants explained in detail below Enlightenment, Prolonging, Treasure hunter
• One of the 4 skilling capes Cloak of Many Pockets, Flamboyant cape, Camo Cloak, or Cloak of the Void explained in detail below
• one of the 3 Bags of holding Small bag of holding, bag of holding, large bag of holding, or either backpack, Newbie Adventurer's Backpack, Dwarven Adventurer's Backpack

Gear Priority list

In order of importance from most to least

• Pickaxe
• Miner's set
• Dwarven Rocksmasher
• Black opal ring or up with Haste
• Dwarven Necklace with Gathering
• Boots/Gloves with Naturalist
• Bag of Holding or Backpack
• One of the four capes
• Boots or Gloves with one of the secondary enchants
• Foraging or fishing tool with Archeology explained below

Which Enchants?

Pickaxe and Armor Enchants

There arent a huge variety of enchants for mining, lots of them just arent usefull or overlap. The one enchant you dont want to touch at all is Empowered prospecting on your smock as you cant craft this one. Archeology can be left as well untill you get an extra foraging or fishing tool with the enchant. Prospecting and Dwarven engineering are you two main enchants for your pickaxe at earlier levels its suggested to use prospecting on your pick as gems and silver are very usefull early game and sell for a good amount. As you get a Dwarven rocksmasher and have less need for silver and gems you can switch your enchants to have engineering on smasher and prospecting on helmet. The enchants I havent mentioned yet are Destructive testing, supercooling, and superheating. There has been a lot of math done by the mining leaderboard to see if destructive testing in a lower zone with lots of junk is better than just mining at a higher zone and as this enchant does not stack with scholar its never mathed out to give better xp. So this enchant can be ingnored unless it gets a rework. Supercooling and heating change the gather % chance of low heat and high heat ores, while not effecting the chance of items that dont use heat(such as slates and silver). These are worth putting on your pick if you are grinding one specific ore.

Secondary Boot/Glove enchant

Pretty easy to decide on these. Tresure hunter if you are foraging in the Deep Pit, Proloning if you use a bunch of buff stacks, and Enlightenment if you want/need more Earth essence.

Which cape to use

Deciding what cape to use for mining is a lot simpler than foraging or fishing. While an arugment can be made for more dangerous encounters in Living forest and Stormy Seas, the demons in Deep pit have a horrible drop table compared to the other two. The only notible drops for the elite demons are; gems, molten ashes, infernal flames, cursed spade head and a very very rare chance for Chaos Crest. None of these drop in high enough quantities to be worth farming here and they can be gotten much easier from Lava Maze or other zones.

Bag or Backpack

Because you cant buy shards with the exception of buying the odd armor piece from the market, its suggested to use backpack first. This lets you get the armor set and complete the quest for the legendary tool faster. Tho if you just want pure mats the bag is of course the better pick, especialy in some of the mining zones where you can get multiple materials in one action such as slates from slate spires.

Priority for augmenting

The most important augs are going to be on your Mining armor set and your pickaxe, because the armor set and Dwarven Smasher use shards you are limited in how fast you can augment these, its best to prioritize the set and only aug the Smasher when you get the crafting mats for it from greater geodes. If you dont have a Smasher yet your Pickaxe should be top priority as it gives the most effective levels per aug. The next impactful augs are going to be bag/backpack, capes, and Dwarven Necklace each aug on the large bag, newbie backpack, Dwarven necklace, camo or flamboyant cape gives 1 effective level (pockets and void cape dont have gathering related aug bonuses so these can be ignored). The small and regular bag of holding get upgraded at +5 and +10 and these should be prioritized as the enchant and aug bonus increase. Backpacks give negative levels, especialy the dwarven backpack, giving -20 at +0, so though expensive these can be augmented alongside the capes. Lastly, for the top 1% out there, prismatic ring gives 1 mining level per aug and is worth augmenting if you are maxed out on everything else.

== General Tips ==`

Talents

Talent points are rare and a grind to get so its smart to use these on talents that benifit multiple skills unless you want to niche into mining.

• Gathering master and grandmaster work for all gathering so these are 100% worth it.
• Mining prodigy is a cheap upgrade but scales less at higher levels, however its needed for Mining grandmaster and if you want to focus mining this is a must.
• Master smelter brings back the old Superheating enchant with a 1% chance to turn ores into bars, this is a decent enchant for passive bars if you dont smith a lot. However smithing and more importantly refining is a much better place for those ores.
• Lastly is Spiraling out of control, this is a very good talent if you have the runecrafing mastery for it. Runes are a great money maker and if your runecrafing mastery is high enough this makes Slate spires the highest xp/h zone.

Affixes

There are five gear slots with affixes that effect mining; necklace, ring, cape, pendant, and pickaxe.

• Necklace has Quick gatherer.
• Ring has Skillfull, gathering yield, greater chests, and ultamate gatherer.
• Cape has dangerous gatherer and gathering shards.
• Pendant has Gathering doubling, greater archeology, and ensouled.
• Pickaxe has Miner, Minimum mining yield, maximum mining yield, trash heap, mining yield, Dwarven superheating, and dwarven quick mining.

For Necklace, cape and pendant you dont need to chose as you can get all affixes. For ring you should prioritize Skillfull and ultamate gatherer, gathering yield if you want more overall yield, greater chests if you want more augment mats for your Dwarven rocksmasher. For pickaxe miner is good at lower levels but doesnt scale, min and max yield are affordable and good at mid levels, trash heap is good for sand, clay, slates, salt, coal, and stone but doesnt increase your profits by much, and though expensive mining yield, dwarven superheating and dwarven quick mining are best for Rocksmasher.