Mining
Equip a pickaxe, stand in a mine, and start swinging. Every 3 seconds the server makes one swing for you, and each swing rolls twice. Once for an ore, and once, separately, for a gem.
The two rolls behave completely differently. The ore roll decays the longer you mine without stopping, until eventually it stops paying out entirely. The gem roll never changes — it is the same flat chance on your first swing and on your twenty-thousandth.
TLDR:
After about 2-3 hours you most likely wont get enough ore to fill 40 inventory spots, so drop all your ore then without moving and you wont have to worry about your inventory filling up. You will still mine gems at the exact same rate regardless of time mining.
Dying resets this timer, so don't die.
Trading does not reset this timer.
Quick reference
Your ore chance over one unbroken session, starting from a typical roll:
| Time mining | Swings | Ore chance per swing | Share of your starting rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 0 | ~10% | 100% |
| 5 min | 100 | 6.7% | 66% |
| 10 min | 200 | 5.1% | 50% |
| 20 min | 400 | 3.4% | 33% |
| 30 min | 600 | 2.5% | 25% |
| 1 h | 1,200 | 1.4% | 14% |
| 1 h 30 m | 1,800 | 1.0% | 10% |
| 2 h | 2,400 | 0.7% | 7% |
| 3 h | 3,600 | 0.5% | 5% |
| 4 h | 4,800 | 0.4% | 4% |
| 6 h | 7,200 | 0.2% | 2% |
| 10 h | 12,000 | 0.1% | 1% |
| 16 h 30 m | 19,800 | 0% | nothing |
Gem chance is identical on every one of those rows.
Where to mine
| Mines | Level | Common ore | Uncommon ore | Rare ore | Gems it can roll |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MineCave · GoldMine (Twin City) | 1 | IronOre | EuxeniteOre | GoldOre | Phoenix · Dragon · Fury |
| CopperMine (1021) · PKerJail · AFKerJail | 1 | CopperOre | IronOre | GoldOre | Phoenix · Dragon · Rainbow · Kylin |
| IronMine (Phoenix City) · IronMine1 · IronMine2 – IronMine4F | 40 | CopperOre | IronOre | GoldOre | Phoenix · Dragon · Rainbow · Kylin |
| CopperMine (Ape City) · SilverMine (Desert City) · CopperMine2F – 4F · SilverMine2F – 4F | 70 | SilverOre | CopperOre | GoldOre | Violet · Moon |
When an ore does land, this is how it splits:
| Level 1 gold/cave mines | Everything else | |
|---|---|---|
| Common ore | 93.5% | 83.6% |
| Uncommon ore | 4.7% | 14.7% |
| GoldOre | 1.9% | 1.7% |
Ore grades. Ores come in ten grades, Rate1 through Rate10. A mine's common ore is weighted against you — 60% Rate1–Rate5, 40% Rate6–Rate10. Its uncommon ore, which is the common ore of the tier below, comes in a flat spread across all ten grades. GoldOre is the exception: the level 1 mines only produce Rate1–Rate3, the level 40 mines Rate1–Rate6, and the level 70 mines the full Rate1–Rate10.
TortoiseGems cannot be mined. They are disabled on this server regardless of which mine you are standing in.
How the ore roll decays
The moment you start mining, the server rolls a hidden starting rate for the session and sets your swing counter to zero. Every completed swing adds one to that counter, and your ore chance is scaled by:
200 ÷ (swings + 200)
That is all of it. The counter only ever goes up while you mine, so the rate only ever goes down:
| Swings | Time | Your ore rate is now |
|---|---|---|
| 200 | 10 min | half |
| 600 | 30 min | a quarter |
| 1,800 | 1 h 30 m | a tenth |
| 3,800 | 3 h 10 m | a twentieth |
| 19,800 | 16 h 30 m | zero |
Because the server works in whole numbers, the rate does not fade smoothly forever — it eventually rounds down to exactly zero, and from that point the mine will never hand you another ore for the rest of the session, no matter how long you keep swinging.
What that costs you in practice
Expected ores from one unbroken session, hour by hour:
| Hour | Ores that hour | Running total |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | ~39 | 39 |
| 2 | ~12 | 51 |
| 3 | ~7 | 58 |
| 4 | ~5 | 63 |
| 5 | ~4 | 66 |
| 6 | ~3 | 69 |
| 7 – 16 | ~1–2 each | ~85 |
An unbroken session is worth about 85 ores in total, and nearly half of them arrive in the first hour.
Reaching gem-only mining
If you are mining for gems, the ores are just inventory clutter, and the decay eventually removes them for you. Here is what actually controls how fast you get there.
It is one unbroken session, or nothing
The counter resets to zero — full ore rate, hidden starting rate re-rolled — the instant mining stops. All of these stop it:
- Moving. A single step, in any direction. This is by far the most common way people reset themselves without noticing.
- Attacking anything, or interacting with an NPC or an item
- Leaving the map, or being teleported out
- Transforming
- Dying
- Getting killed and revived by a water tao resets the session.
- Unequipping your pickaxe or hoe
- Logging out, disconnecting, or the server restarting
- You can trade other players. That will not break the session as long as you do not move.
- You can drop ore that will not break the session.
Nothing carries over. Fourteen hours of progress and one step put you back to swing zero.
How long it takes
Between 10 and 23 hours of uninterrupted mining to reach true zero. The exact figure is fixed by the hidden roll made when you started, you cannot see it, and about nine sessions in ten land in the upper part of that range — call it 16 to 23 hours.
What you can actually do
- Don't stop. This is the entire mechanic. There is no way to swing faster than one per 3 seconds, and no way to advance the counter except by swinging.
- Don't chase a shorter session. A low hidden roll would finish sooner, but the only way to re-roll it is to stop mining, which also throws away every swing you have banked.
- Mine anywhere except the level 1 gold/cave mines. Those roll ore about 5% more often than every other mine, at every point on the curve. It is a small edge, but it is the only one that exists.
- Stop short of zero. You do not need the full 16+ hours. By 90 minutes ore is down to a tenth of its starting rate, and from hour 2 onward you are collecting one to three ores an hour. That is already gem-focused mining in everything but name — grinding out the remaining fourteen hours removes maybe 30 more ores.
What does not work
- Filling your inventory. A full bag does stop ores from landing, but the swing still counts and any gem you roll is destroyed too. See below.
Keep bag space free
Your inventory holds 40 items, and neither ores nor gems stack — every single one takes its own slot. When the bag is full:
- the ore or gem is silently destroyed, with no message
- the swing still counts toward the decay
There is no warning and no recovery. A gem rolled into a full bag is simply gone, which makes a full inventory the single most expensive mistake in mining.