Mining

Swing a pick anywhere on land and the ground gives.

Illustration: two small miners in pointed hats at the bottom of an immense dark shaft, lit by a single lantern. One swings his pick; the other has stopped and stares wide-eyed at the wall. Above them the rock rises in endless identical layers.

Of Shandar and Demetrious, who went down

In the days when Alora was changing, and none could say into what, there were two miners, Shandar and Demetrious, and none in all the land were more given to the pick than they. And they said: Let us go down and learn the whole of the mines, that those who come after may be the wiser. And they went down.

Nine months they laboured in the dark, and then a tenth. And at the end they had learned this: that there are spoils beneath Alora, and that any may have them, and that the price of them is the mind. For it is not the falling roof that takes a miner, nor the things that breathe below, but the sameness of the dark, stroke upon stroke, until reason goes out like a lamp.

And Shandar came up and wrote it in a book, that others might be warned. And still, in every part of Alora, the picks are heard.

A retelling of Insanity! by Shandar

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You start harvesting from a mineral pocket.

You pry uncut carnelian from a mineral pocket.
You deplete a mineral pocket.
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You harvest fertile soil (8) from a wall of loose soil.
Fertile soil (8) falls onto the floor.
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A skeleton yells 'I'm going to tear Sharask apart!'
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You work up a sweat, harvesting from a wall of loose soil.
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You harvest fertile soil (8) from a wall of loose soil.
You strip out the last a wall of loose soil.
You clear a path deeper into decayed vegetative matter.
A passage opens up to the west.
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A few minutes in a mine, November 2026. Token announcements and two repeated lines left out.

A game screen: after the words You gesture and chant Inviso Praeter and You receive a revelatory vision, a small map of the surrounding rock drawn in coloured text characters, with orange and white walls around dark tunnels. — What a miner sees. The scry spell shows the rock around you before you dig into it.

What the rock holds

The stone comes in 5 bands from the surface down to level 50, and in it lie 18 kinds of ore and gem, each at its own depths.

Sandstone	0 to 2
Clay	3 to 15
Shalestone	16 to 25
Limestone	26 to 35
Granite	36 to 50

Every ore and gem, with depths and chances

As the game explains it

The Mining crafting is a skill that can help you to gather resources within the mines that work with a variety of different crafts. Mining is a craft that can be learned from a shop in New Tarsonis, it is titled "Pitter (Mining)". With this skill and a mining pick you are able to mine under the surface layer of the world map. Once under the surface layer you are able to continue downwards until you reach the abyss. You may also mine in the four directions being north, south, east, west. (Note: Mining picks can break, unless you have a pick made of emeralite)

When mining up and down you are required to reinforce with a girder, except for when originally starting your shaft from the surface. You can make these girders with your mining skill at a forge with the right materials; girders are listed under the craft menu known as "Architecture". While mining be sure to keep an eye out for unstable fault-lines as mining into these can cause the mines to collapse.

When you mine in a direction it will completely strip the wall of any resources in that direction and place them in your inventory. After the wall is stripped of resources it will continue to mine the rest of the stone layer remaining. Sometimes while mining you will come across Voidstones, these are solid walls that are not capable of being mined. To recognize these on the map, they are a blank black space, ie. + + (the space in between the two + symbols would represent an existing Voidstone.) Knowing this can help you better plan your mining route as you go.

Prospecting is a useful mining skill, and some races have it as a bonus. Mine smell works the same way, but is racial only. A character with both gets two chances to spot ore, but never sees deeper than 3 rooms. For a large picture of the mines a player could make use of the scry spell.

Another key factor in mining is Xorns. A druid or ranger would be able to access these mining helping mobs the easiest, but any character with the right amount of complexity in the Nature school would be able to summon cast them. How many Xorns you can command depends on your summon limit. In order to have access to the spell to summon Xorns a person would need to put an alternate rune in their Sunbeam prism.

Having this craft, Pitter (Mining), gives you the ability to process raw mining materials, such as ores.

Details

'reinforce' (or 'use girder') shores up a mine room with a girder.

From the help file: help mining

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