Mining and smelting

A player with a pickaxe or a shovel digs iron ore out of the rock, and smelts it into ingots at a forge. The Mining skill decides both and grows with use; the ore of a place runs out and comes back with time.

How to dig

Double click a pickaxe or a shovel, in your hands, in your backpack or lying within reach. You read “Where do you wish to dig?” and get a cursor.
Pick the rock of a mountain or the floor of a cave within 2 tiles.
Your character swings once, and the result comes 0.9 seconds later with the sound of the pick.

You must still be within 2 tiles of the place when the result comes, and you dig one place at a time: a second double click meanwhile does nothing.

You read	Why
`You can't mine while riding.`	You are on a mount: get off first
`You can't mine there.`	The place is no rock: grass, sand, a road, or a static that is no cave floor
`You can't mine that.`	You picked an item or someone
`That is too far away.`	The rock is more than 2 tiles away
`You have moved too far away to continue mining.`	You walked away before the result
`There is no metal here to mine.`	The place has no ore left: try elsewhere, or come back later
`Someone has gotten to the metal before you.`	The last ore was taken while you swung
`You loosen some rocks but fail to find any useable ore.`	The try failed
`Your backpack is full, so the ore you mined is lost.`	Your backpack cannot take the pile: the ore is gone from the place all the same

What you get

In a place of iron the try is rolled on the Mining skill between 0 and 100, so the chance of a dig that works is the skill itself, and the skill may rise at every try (another metal has its own bounds: see Metals). A dig of iron that works gives one pile of iron ore, which joins the pile of its kind already in the backpack:

Pile	How often	Ingots it smelts into
Large	3 in 4	2 for each ore
Medium, in two shapes	1 in 8	1 for each ore
Small	1 in 8	1 for every 2 ore

The tool does not wear out.

Metals

A place of rock is of one metal, drawn again each time its ore is back, so the same rock may give gold today and iron tomorrow. About half of the places are of iron.

Metal	Places in a thousand	Mining it asks for	Its dig is tried between	Smelted between
Iron	496	0	0 and 100	25 and 75
Dull copper	112	65	25 and 105	40 and 90
Shadow iron	98	70	30 and 110	45 and 95
Copper	84	75	35 and 115	50 and 100
Bronze	70	80	40 and 120	55 and 105
Gold	56	85	45 and 125	60 and 110
Agapite	42	90	50 and 130	65 and 115
Verite	28	95	55 and 135	70 and 120
Valorite	14	99	59 and 139	74 and 124

One who has the Mining of the metal digs its ore one dig in two, and iron the other; one who lacks it always digs iron. The ore of a metal is a large pile of its colour, which smelts into ingots of that metal, two for each ore, tried between the bounds of the last column. Blacksmithing forges with the ingots of each metal. A miner below a metal’s difficulty (the middle of those bounds: 65 for dull copper, 99 for valorite) reads “You have no idea how to smelt this strange ore!” and nothing burns. A single ore of a metal that fails to smelt is burnt away. The ore of a metal always comes as a large pile, unlike iron’s four sizes: a choice to keep one template a metal, which makes a little more metal than a pile size drawn as for iron would.

Smelting

Double click a pile of ore, in your backpack or lying within 2 tiles. You read “Select the forge on which to smelt the ore, or another pile of ore with which to combine it.”
Pick a forge within 2 tiles: one placed as an item, or one that is part of the map.

The whole pile is smelted at once. The try is rolled on the Mining skill between 25 and 75 for iron (see Metals for the others): below 25 a smelt always fails, from 75 it always works, and the try may raise the skill.

The smelt	What happens
Works	The pile becomes ingots of its metal in your backpack, by its size (the table above); an odd small ore is left. You read “You smelt the ore removing the impurities and put the metal in your backpack.”
Fails	Half the pile is burnt away, rounded down. A pile of one iron ore gets smaller instead (a single ore of another metal is burnt away): a large one becomes medium, a medium one small. You read “You burn away the impurities but are left with less useable metal.”

A single small ore answers “There is not enough metal-bearing ore in this pile to make an ingot.” Picking something that is no forge answers That is not a forge., and a forge more than 2 tiles away “That is too far away.” The ore is taken before the ingots are given: a backpack with no room for them loses the metal, and you read You have no room in your backpack for the ingots: the metal is lost. A pile you hold on your cursor, or one inside a chest on the ground, answers “The ore is too far away.”: put it in your backpack or on the ground first.

The ore of a place

Each map is cut in areas of 8 by 8 tiles. An area holds 10 to 34 ore, drawn the first time someone digs there. A dig that works takes one; a failed try takes none. The area is full again, all at once, 10 to 20 minutes after the first ore taken from it.

The areas are kept in memory: after a restart every place is full, and its metal is drawn again. The numbers are the resource ore of harvest.toml.

Change the rules

The rules of a dig are in scripts/items/pickaxe.lua: the range, the time, the piles and how often each comes, the land tiles that are rock and the statics that are a cave floor. Those of a smelt are in scripts/items/ore.lua: the range, the skill, the ingots of each pile; the forges are in scripts/common/smithy.lua and the metals (their ore, ingots, Mining and bounds) in scripts/common/metals.lua. See Shipped scripts. A template digs with script_id = "pickaxe" and is smelted with script_id = "ore".

Existing roots

A root made before mining existed needs three things. Run mgctl init, which adds the two scripts. Then add the resource ore to your data/harvest.toml, and the scripts to the templates: script_id = "pickaxe" to the pickaxes and the shovels of templates/items/skills/tools/mining.toml, script_id = "ore" to the four piles of iron ore of templates/items/skills/resources/mining.toml. Or copy the three files from the distribution: mgctl init never replaces a file you may have changed. scripts/items/ore.lua now reads the forges from scripts/common/smithy.lua: copy it with it. For the metals, copy scripts/common/metals.lua, templates/items/metals.toml and both scripts again, and add the [[resource.vein]] of the ore to your data/harvest.toml: without the veins every place is iron.

Not yet

Combining two piles into one; tools that wear out; sand, stone and gems; melting a metal item back into ingots.