Mining - start from the bottom, need help

[Sixurin]

There is any miner with some experience? How much strenght I need for meaningful mining? I have for now 18 strenght - I can only mine the initial walls in caves, behind them I only found feldspar, basalt or flint nuffin more. (I have only stone axe I can't craft something else like pickaxe)

Somebody have any tips, patent?

[Potjeh]

Don't waste your hunger on mining before you have coal from your tar kilns (you won't find coal mines on level 1). By that time you should have enough per*exp to find rustroot, so use that to find ore close to a cave, so you spend as little hunger as possible. Don't mine next to tiles that spawn cave dust, you'll cause a cave-in. Raise your masonry so you can get decent ore quality and good clay for your tarn kilns and smelters. Your strength should be sufficient to get started, but do try to work on raising strength (int is still more important tho until like 50). And if you find quality stone while mining make a better axe. You can spiral axe quality a bit by making axe with good stone, splitting a block with that axe and than using the branch to make a better axe.

[RedKGB]

And if you find quality stone while mining make a better axe. You can spiral axe quality a bit by making axe with good stone, splitting a block with that axe and than using the branch to make a better axe.

I been doing this, its slow, but for me, fun.

[LostJustice]

We didn't wait for rustroot. Best thing that we found was to take an alt with a decent enough axe and a bucket of water and have them mine 1 tile every 20 wall tiles or so prospecting for ore through a cave. Fastest way to get started using an alt. Also, cave walls have a chance to cave in regardless if there is dust or not. If you see dust don't mine in the 3x3 area around it. Also, once you find ore, you do need coal which like Potjeh said, does not exist on level one but this doesn't mean you can't mine the initial batch (5x5 for smelter aka 25 ore) to get the first bar of metal to make a mine support so you can safely mine the rest. Layer 1 cave ins probably wont kill you if you get hit by a cave in once. If you do, stop and switch to another alt and have them mine. If the stone too hard, forget about it and come back later but usually not worth it because hardness does not relate to quality in nodes so it probably going to be low q any just like the rest of the cave.

[Myrgard]

Hardens really has nothing to do with quality but every type of mineral has it's own hardens multiplier with sandstone being the softest and basalt being one of the hardest.
In my experience ores containing iron tend to be on the hard side so if in your first prospecting run you find a lot of places to hard for you to mine and you don't find any iron ore there are good odds that it was simply too hard. Recheck those places once you get stronger.

[MagicManICT]

If you're getting your masonry skill up like you should for mining, look for better quality stones to make a new axe. Axe Q * STR > hardness, so it's another way to speed up mining.

[RedKGB]

Has it ever been posted the level of hardiness in respect to the differnce in the hardness level?

[MagicManICT]

Has it ever been posted the level of hardiness in respect to the differnce in the hardness level?

Not that I'm aware. Best that I can state is that is a base "hardness level" that can occur on nodes and gets higher the deeper you go. Each rock/ore type is a modifier on the node, so one rock might be .5x hardness, another might be 2x or even 3x.

The problem is the tedium of truly testing the system for how it functions and finding the hardness of each stone.

[RedKGB]

The problem is the tedium of truly testing the system for how it functions and finding the hardness of each stone.

Yea, it would be a useful tool, but yea, lots of effort to crack the system.

[Koyu]

As there is mining thread already ill ask here.

Are tarn kiln working properly? Mine is running over 12h now with ~40 wood and still running (dont remember the timers from W9 but it seems really long already)