How do I... Find metal?

[Procne]

Pickaxes mine faster than stoneaxes so a lower quality pickaxe can be better than a higher quality stoneaxe to some degree.

I'm not sure about that. Pickaxes seem to apply "ticks" faster, but at the same stamina cost. So if you were to run out of stamina with normal axe then you would most likely run out of it with same ql pickaxe.

[TeckXKnight]

Like I said, higher quality stone axe. The idea is that even though pickaxes are innately faster, a higher quality stone axe will boost your mining ability high enough to meet or exceed a lower quality pickaxe. This is much less relevant this world though, as stone quality and wood quality are so low that high quality stone axes are hard to make.

[MagicManICT]

as stone quality and wood quality are so low that high quality stone axes are hard to make.

Wood is the same as it always was, but stone is because we don't have quarries yet and all the boulders are q10. I'm guessing that all ore and stone so far from mines hasn't really been better than q10? (Haven't gotten into mining yet... usually something I start doing day 1.)

[TeckXKnight]

Wood is always the slowest material to raise in quality so I stand by my statement there. Stone has been slow going. There aren't many quality nodes and going down levels doesn't seem to guarantee you stone quality. What quality nodes there are are small increases. Smelting ore doesn't create higher quality stone anymore, only smelting slag does. So yeah, stone has been slow going.

[Sevenless]

Stone Q raise like poop. The slag resmelting is probably the best thing to happen to that all game.

[oONekoGami]

That determines the speed at which you can mine. If you can't mine fast enough to clear a tile before your stamina bar would drop below 15% then the game will not let you mine a wall. Instead it will tell you it's too hard. I think it's something like sqrt (str*tool quality) vs wall hardness but its been so long that I can't say with any accuracy that this is true. Mining faster is always better though so it's worth it to have more strength and better tools. Pickaxes mine faster than stoneaxes so a lower quality pickaxe can be better than a higher quality stoneaxe to some degree.

From experience, that doesn't seem to be the case. Pickaxes only increased the speed in which i could mine, but i still couldn't mine the things i couldn't mine with a stone axe.

I think hardiness only takes str in count, not tool quality. Tool quality though helps a lot when you're mining, speeds things up soo much faster.