Hello and welcome to my guide! I've been thinking of putting this together for a while, and now as I sit here waiting for the MMO to release I figure it's a good time. There are many things I've learned from my time as a dedicated miner, and it's time to put it into guide form. So without further delay, here goes!

So, the first and probably most useful tip is regarding reinforcement. There's a lot of misunderstanding on how this actually works.

First of all, columns DO have a 3x3 support area. Columns are the second half of reinforcement. You are intended to use both columns and boards. Using good quality wood, reinforcing with only boards or columns (both are equal reinforcement time), you're looking at about 1 real life week of reinforcement until the REINFORCEMENT collapses, leaving an unreinforced tile. After about another real life day, the tile itself will collapse.

If you reinforce the same tile with boards and a column, you're looking at about TWO real life weeks of reinforcement. After the first week, the column will collapse. Then you'll have another week until the boards collapse. Then another day until the tile collapses.

So, this makes a huge difference. Rather than single reinforcing, where after it collapses you only have a day to catch it until your tile is completely collapsed. With double reinforcing, you have up to a week to catch the collapsed column and replace it.

I haven't tested if the collapse times for the tile/boards refreshes when you reinforce with boards/column. Like if you have an unreinforced tile, say it will collapse in 2 game days. Reinforce it with boards, those boards then collapse. Does it pick back up where it left off, or refresh it to the 8/9/etc game days? If someone can testify I'll update this part.

Anyway there you have it. Double reinforce, people!

You can inspect the tile floor to see when it will collapse. The number given only represents the current "state" of reinforcement. So if it's double reinforced, inspecting will tell you how long 'til the column collapses. Inspecting with one reinforcement obviously tells you how long until that collapses. But the time given is not how long 'til the TILE collapses, unless of course you don't have any reinforcements.

Alright, so this section has to do with the elevation of your tunnel. When starting a tunnel, the elevation of it is dependent upon the tile you're standing on. So if you're standing on elevation 50 and tunnel forward into the nearby tile, the floor of the mine will be at elevation 50. Tunneling up/down changes this by 0.5 elevation, respectively. So standing on 50 and tunneling up will make it 50.5 and tunneling down will make it 49.5.

If you want to make the entrance to your mine as smooth as possible, you want to remove as little material as possible. So let's say you've found the tile you want to start the tunnel on. It's at elevation 50.1. So you're gonna want to start it at 50. You can accomplish this by standing on 50.5 and tunneling down or 49.5 and tunneling up. Or, 50 and tunneling forward.

Related to the previous section. This part in particular has to do with removing those pesky rocks from your land that you want to flatten.

First of all. Let's say you have a patch of land that you're flattening everything out to 50. You've got a pesky rock on your land, reaching up to let's say 51 elevation. If you stand on your elevation 50 and tunnel forward into this rock, you'll certainly remove it. Once the tunnel collapses you'll be left with dirt, easily removed. (Thank GOD for the fix where each point of elevation from collapsed tiles only gives 3 dirt instead of 60+60+8 PER POINT of elevation!!!) However when you remove this dirt, you'll get down to elevation 50 and run into... stone.

So if you are wanting to flatten this spot, unpaved, at elevation 50, then you need to make the elevation of the tunnel (see previous section) to 49.9. This way there's a layer of dirt at the 50 elevation which you can flatten.

However, if you're wanting to pave. You need to go an extra point deeper. Because you can't pave on top of stone. If your intention is to pave at 50 then you'll need dirt at 49.9 to pave on top of, so the tunnel needs to be at 49.8.

You could of course just stand on the 50 and tunnel down into the rock, which would make it 49.5, which is plenty. However this is anywhere from 0.3 to 0.4 points of extra elevation that you don't need to dig out. Each point of elevation for rock is 60 material, so 60 x 3 is 180 rock and 60 x 4 is 240 rock. Multiply this by the number of tiles you need to dig out, and you can understand how this quickly turns into an unnecessary amount of extra work. Easily avoided by being smart. :)

This section has to do with knowing when your tunnel will break the surface of the world, or if it will form an actual tunnel with a roof.

There is no elevation limit for the first tile of a tunnel. This is particularly useful info for those of you who like to terraform into mountains. Let's say you're trying to flatten at elevation 50 and you've been burrowing straight into the side of a mountain, at this point the sheer rock cliff next to your territory is all the way up to elevation 60 or higher. It doesn't matter. The first tile of a mine ALWAYS breaks to the surface of the world. So if you stand on your elevation 50 and tunnel into that elevation 60, you're gonna be removing alllll that stone (10 elevation is 100 x 0.1 elevation, each 0.1 is 60 rock so 60 x 100 is a solid 6k stone you're gonna be removing!). Then when it collapses, you can lower allll that dirt down and repeat the process. This is the most efficient way to remove rocks/cliffs/mountains/etc. Just keep in mind that solid stone cascades at 10 elevation difference!

In order for a tunnel to have a ceiling, the ceiling needs to be 1 elevation thick. Which means the maximum distance from the surface you can be before it'll start a tunnel is 2.9. At 3, a tunnel is made.

A rather straightforward tip. I can't recommend this enough. Yes it's 25% more work to do it this way, but believe me it's worth it.

For one thing, this avoids a rather common and nasty bug where sometimes when you tunnel down, the opening is glitched and is way way smaller than it should be. And no, not even a female character can fit in this glitched tile. It can really mess up your plans when you're following an ore deposit for example, because when you run into this you either have to wait for it to collapse or find a way around.

Second, even if the tile doesn't glitch, the tunnels are too flipping small to begin with. Your head will try to catch on the edge (female characters might avoid this, but your male counterparts won't be so lucky). The camera is forced in super close and it's just not fun. Doing your mine this way makes it look much nicer.

Plenty of head room, and the camera plays nicer vertically. Any self-respecting miner needs to do this!

A detailed section on how to actually go about extracting your ore.

Alright, so first of all, you want to start the mine as low as possible. When you're prospecting, narrow down the range as close as you can, and then, using that same range, keep prospecting the adjacent tiles that are a lower elevation than the one you're standing on. If you detect ore on any of the lower tiles, move to that tile. Repeat this until you're as low as possible with as low of a range as possible. Start your tunnel, then start working your way towards the ore. Go DOWN, and remember to tunnel forward before you tunnel down!

You want to be as low as possible when you actually hit the ore. This is because tunneling up is far, far easier than tunneling down. It doesn't glitch out like tunneling down does. It's 25% more work to tunnel down than tunnel up.

The thing that's a pain about this, is that while you want to START as low as possible, you want to actually mine the ore from the top down. The reason for this is obvious. If you mine out the foundation, you can't mine out the ore that's in the ceiling. Unless you wait for it to collapse. That's up to you, but it can be messy.

So, you want to start following the ore deposit. Once you hit the ore, DO NOT TUNNEL THROUGH IT! Ever. Your mining tunnel needs to follow the edge of the deposit. When you're tunneling and trying to follow it, if you ever get ore in your swing, then you need to stop and go a different direction. I won't be overly specific with how to choose your direction. This is an advanced guide after all, I'm sure you can figure out how to follow the edge of a deposit.

Never ever reinforce on top of the ore. For some reason, the tiles sometimes like to glitch and they won't let you mine into them, so you'll have to wait for the empty tile above (that you previously mined out) to collapse before you can get what's below. Obviously if you reinforce, this can create a huge pain in the butt.

So, the height of a tunnel tile is 2. Every time you tunnel up/down it changes this by 0.5. So obviously if you tunnel down 4 times, this takes you to a new layer to mine out. Sometimes when you're doing this however, on the 4th tile down you end up on a corner and don't actually have an adjacent ore tile to mine into. When this happens just go back up to the 3rd tile down and start from there. No big deal.

Alright, so this last part is really advanced and is also a major pain in the butt, to the point where even I don't bother doing it anymore. But, it does make things a little nicer if you do, so I'll go ahead and explain it.

First of all, the TOPS of the ore deposits are cut off at random ranges, so you can't line it up going off of that. To explain what I mean by lining up, I mean making it so that when you get to the floor of an ore deposit (it doesn't have to be the VERY bottom of the entire thing... I believe deposits can change in width so it would happen here too), you don't have to get partial stone in your effort.

While the tops are random, the bottoms of the ore deposit are always in sync with a particular elevation. That elevation is specific to each ore deposit, there is no universal elevation, so you have to figure it out for each mine.

How do you figure it out? Well that's the hard part. Once you hit your ore deposit, you have to follow it DOWN until you get to the point where you see it transitioning into stone. The bottom. Then what you have to do is mine into it, intentionally making it so that you get the smallest amount of stone possible in the block you're mining out. Once that block is cleared, look at the wall of it and you have to "eyeball it" to figure how far off in elevation you are. Roughly 1 millimeter = 0.1 elevation.

Make your guess, then go back to the entrance and start all over. You'll probably want to wait for it all to collapse, that way you can go through your first tunnel again, only adjusting the height slightly, that way you're mostly going through your collapsed dirt. When you get back to the bottom, mine into it again, and if you aren't getting any stone in your swings, and when the tile is empty there is stone in the floor of the block you just mined out, then congratulations, you've perfectly lined up the entire mine.

I personally think it's much less of a pain in the butt to just deal with the stone in your swings for when you hit those floors, than it is to line it up, but hey. Sometimes you get lucky and the very start of your mine also ends up being right at the bottom, so you would only have to re-dig a very small amount of tiles to line it up.

There you have it! I hope this provided some useful information. I'll be sure to keep this up to date. If I think of anything to add, I'll add it. Please comment, and feel free to ask any questions! Questions may result in me adding more sections.

Thanks for reading!