Harvesting
Mining
Mining is the backbone of every metal chain in the game. Ore becomes ingots at a forge, ingots become weapons, armour, tools and half the furniture in your house — so a smith who cannot mine is a smith buying their materials from someone who can. It is also the most interruptible harvesting skill: rock faces attract things that bite.
What the rock gives up
Higher skill unlocks the rarer ores; you keep finding the common ones too. Blackrock Ore needs 110 effective skill: your own skill plus the bonus of the tool in your hand and any band. Raw skill stops at 100, so on skill alone a Grandmaster's draw ends at Valorite Ore — the Share at GM column — and the last column is the draw once gear has made up the difference.
| Skill | Yields | Share at GM | Share at 110 effective |
|---|---|---|---|
| No requirement |  Iron Ore | 82.0% | 81.9% |
| 65.0 |  Dull Copper Ore | 4.0% | 4.0% |
| 70.0 |  Shadow Iron Ore | 3.5% | 3.5% |
| 75.0 |  Copper Ore | 3.0% | 3.0% |
| 80.0 |  Bronze Ore | 2.5% | 2.5% |
| 85.0 |  Golden Ore | 2.0% | 2.0% |
| 90.0 |  Agapite Ore | 1.5% | 1.5% |
| 95.0 |  Verite Ore | 1.0% | 1.0% |
| 99.0 |  Valorite Ore | 0.5% | 0.5% |
| 110.0 effective |  Blackrock Ore | — | 0.02% |
Smelting ore into ingots
Smelting trains Mining rather than a skill of its own, so the whole metal chain sits under one number.
| Skill | Ore | Becomes |
|---|---|---|
| No requirement | Iron Ore |  Iron Ingot |
| 65.0 | Dull Copper Ore |  Dull Copper Ingot |
| 70.0 | Shadow Iron Ore |  Shadow Iron Ingot |
| 75.0 | Copper Ore |  Copper Ingot |
| 80.0 | Bronze Ore |  Bronze Ingot |
| 85.0 | Golden Ore |  Golden Ingot |
| 90.0 | Agapite Ore |  Agapite Ingot |
| 95.0 | Verite Ore |  Verite Ingot |
| 99.0 | Valorite Ore |  Valorite Ingot |
| 100.0 | Blackrock Ore |  Blackrock Ingot |
Rares
Five yard pieces found only by working this skill. Any work at the skill can turn one up — every swing or craft, success or failure, and the hours you put in while logged out as well. Each stands in your yard or your house, carries its own story on its tooltip, and trades like any other item.
| Piece | Its story |
|---|---|
 The Last Canary's Cage | A brass cage on a pit-prop, its door open and its perch empty. Minoc hangs a canary at every new face; this one's bird flew up the shaft one morning without being asked, and the whole crew had the sense to follow it. The roof came down behind the last boot, and nobody has put a bird in the cage since. |
 The Foreman's Pick | Driven into a boulder by a Minoc foreman at the end of his last shift, and left where it stuck. Every apprentice gets one pull at it on their first morning, and none has ever shifted it — which, they are told, is the lesson. The foreman, had anyone asked him, would have told them he used a sledgehammer. |
 Deep-Shaft Lamp | A miner watches the flame and not the rock, because a lamp goes out before the air turns bad. This one was carried out of the Britain Mines the day the lower gallery flooded, still burning, and it has not gone out since — not in rain, not in wind, and not the once somebody tried. |
 Nine-Seam Boulder | Iron, shadow, bronze, gold, agapite, verite, valorite and both of the coppers nobody can tell apart — all nine seams threaded through one rock the size of a barrel. Three assayers have called it impossible in writing. None of them has offered to take it off your hands. |
 Heart of an Earth Elemental | What is left of an Earth Elemental when the miner swings first: a round of stone as warm as a hearthstone, glowing along its cracks. It grinds, very slowly, when nobody is watching. Minoc families keep one in the cellar over winter and do not discuss it with visitors. |