Have you played the game for a bit by now, maybe gotten to Floor 10 and slain the Ancient King, and now are wondering what all those other menus are for? If so, this is a guide for you.
Buriedbornes is a game with quite a lot of depth when it comes to character creation, and this guide will focus on teaching you the basics.

I've played the game before on mobile but never done anything beyond just doing dungeons. With the release of Steam version I took a deeper dive into the mechanics of the game, and I felt like sharing my findings with people who might be curious about similar things.

To begin the journey, we'll need to fund our fun. By now you've probably seen that everything fun costs soulstones (rerolling items and unlocking more jobs).
The fastest and most efficient way to farm obscene amounts of soulstones to never have to worry about spending them, is Mining. There's many ways to go about this nowadays, with varying degrees of speed and effort, so let's go through them.

A mining character consists of 5 things:

1. Soulstone gain skill - A skill, or a skill modifier, which causes you to gain Soulstones on use. Mining skill or Productive modifier are the most commonly used.
   
2. Cooldown reduction - By default mining skills have long cooldown, so not having to wait 15 turns between uses is gonna speed things up a bit. These include Tailwind rooms, Silence + Ninjutsu combo, or simply the Demon job.
   
3. Soulstone gain boosters - Any effect that increases gained soulstones is desirable. There's a couple passives that increase your gains, such as Greed, Golden Cat, or Collector. Harder, higher tier dungeons also grant more stones, up to 5x bonus in tier 5. However these boosts are all additive, so going to tier 5 location with Greed+2 will yield 6x multiplier, not 10x.
   
4. Survivability - Since you'll want to stay in one room and spam the same skill over and over, we need something to offset the enemy reducing our health to 0. Active skills that restore health are good to start with, and best options are Autoheal passives, or simply not letting the enemy act at all.
   
5. Automation - Pressing the same button over and over is gonna get boring after a while, so a way to let your guy collect stones for you while you do something else is awesome. While possible to set up a build that farms for you automatically using Frenzy or Puppet, it's quite difficult so just keep it in mind as an "end-game build" for later.

To keep it simple, in order to start mining, you'll need to unlock the Miner job for 2000 soulstones, who starts with the Mining skill and Greed passive. Give him a healing potion as starting gift, and send him off to any dungeon you have unlocked (the higher the better). Look for a room with Tailwind+Enemy modifiers, and go wild - spam Mining, heal when you get low, repeat until you die, and start over. Congratulations, you are now mining Soulstones!

Once you have about 10-20k soulstones, we can move on to the next part.

By clicking on the Operation Room button, you'll enter the menu to manage Contracts. You can equip your character with one contract containing up to 5 beneficial passive effects.

Contracts by default start with 1 (or 3 for the rare ones) effects on them, and can be merged with each other to combine the effects together. Merging causes one randomly chosen effect from the material contract to be transferred to the original contract, however if the material has only one effect, there's no randomness involved so don't worry.
Certain effects are "Unique" and cannot be merged into another contract, so if you want that effect you must use that contract as the starting point for merging (and sometimes deal with 2 lame built-in effects).

You can also Salvage possessed contracts to gain Dark Study, with the amount gained based on rarity of the contract. If you press the Salvage button without selecting contracts, you'll be prompted to salvage all unstarred contracts you own. I personally keep 1-2 copies of any rare contract I get and salvage everything else.
With Dark Study, you can buy new contracts in the shop. Almost every contract with only 1 effect (except Promotion, Pumpkin Head, and Add:Capture) can be bought with Dark Study, so don't feel the need to hoard anything. The shop search function is case-sensitive.


There's a lot going on and it can be hard to tell what's good or not, but for Miner it's quite simple.
Our goal is going to be a Contract with Golden Cat+2 (so, three lines of Golden Cat), and Teleport and Scout to make finding Tailwind rooms easier. You can buy all of these with Dark Study. You could also go for 3x Golden Cat and 2x Greed, if you want slightly more gains.



To get Dark Study, simply buy random contracts, until you get a Rare one that salvages for ~100 DS, then head over to the shop to buy the contracts we need. Choose one to use as base, and then merge the other four into it.
Once that's done, you can begin a new run and equip your contract at the character creation.

By comparison, Amulets are a lot simpler. You equip an amulet of "skill", and you start with that skill. The soulstone shop has 421 amulets, and there's no duplicates, so buy all of them out and have fun starting with (almost) any skill you want.

For the Miner, you can give him a healing skill like Full Healing to replace the potion with an infinite solution.
You can also give a Mining amulet to another job, Demon in particular can just start mining in the very first room thanks to her passive.

There's a lot to unpack here, and there's no quick "make miner stronger" now since you'll need a bit of luck to find relevant parts.

Lab Parts are similar to Contracts, in that they give you 5 different effects at the start of each run. Tthe difference is that instead of combining them into one item that any job can use, you equip them onto a specific job.
Similarly to Contracts, you can have only one 5* lab part equipped at a time. Those 5* effects include unique passives seen on other jobs and legendary items.
Like contracts, you can dissect unwanted parts to gain fragments of death.
Equipping and unequipping lab parts costs fragments of death. Many players choose to spend 300 gold shards on an upgrade that removes this cost, to allow yourself freedom in experimentation. The purple button may make it seem like it, but you do not permanently lose parts when removing them.

Now, how do we get lab parts? There's few ways.
First is buying them from the shop, either through Bargain or Random Part, although prices are pretty steep and there's cheaper ways. Random Part sometimes has a 50% off discount, so it might be worth gambling then if you have a lot of Fragments. Some rare parts (and contracts) can be obtained through seasonal shops, so keep an eye out for those.
Second is by entering Conquest rooms. On floors 11+ you will sometimes find a Nest or Monument room. Entering them will cause a mini-boss to spawn, which when defeated will grant you a random Lab Part and few Fragments of Death. There's no benefit to salvage parts when you find them (especially if you're not sure what they do), and if you ever go over the part limit you can still gain more, you'll just be unable to start a new run until you clean up your storage.
Lastly, you can also obtain parts from captured enemies.

You can capture enemies by using capture skills or the Add:Capture effect, which on defeat puts them in Detention. Those monsters can then be put in Jail, or combined with monster currently in Jail. Detention has 10 slots by default, and when it's full your oldest monster will be released automatically.
Monsters have two default effects that they always appear with, and can sometimes appear with a random third (or fourth) effect
Combining monsters costs Fragments of Death equal to 10x total Injury after the operation, so don't get reckless. The injuries are added up, and passive effects of combined monster's are added to the bottom of the list. If the jailed monster already had a specific effect that's being combined onto it, that effect will be merged with the existing one.
The order of which monster gets fused into which is very crucial here.
In order to dissect a lab part, you must increase Jailed monster's Injury to 80% or higher (but below 100%). Once that's achieved, whatever effect is at the bottom will be obtained as a lab part if possible (some effects can not be dissected, or don't exist as lab parts at all).
Multiple fusions are allowed, however they do get costly so it's best to fuse just once if possible.


As an example, here's a captured Rich Kobold with three effects. In order to dissect the Collector part, we need to capture a monster with a Damage Reduce effect, and between least 38-57 injury. Here I got lucky and found exactly 38 injury Dark Stalker. A monster under 38 can also work, you just need to perform an additional fusion before Kobold to get it to 38.


We put this Dark Stalker in jail, and then we combine our Kobold into it.


As a result, Kobold's effects are put at the bottom of the list, and the Damage Reduce is absorbed into the existing one, leaving Collector at the bottom.


Dissecting this monster grants us the Collector part.



Mr Blue Sky has made a guide that you should check out for more in-depth information.[cdn.discordapp.com]

To fund your maniacal dissecting frenzy, you'll need a way to farm Fragments of Death. A man's best friend for this is the "Dog" job, whose passive gives fragments whenever you defeat a boss or conquest.
The amount gained is based on tier of the dungeon, and you can find the Field Survey contract and Collector lab part to further boost your gains, and whatever other effects you choose should focus on helping you survive and kill enemies.
In the Hunt dungeon, you can also sometimes find a "Lab" room modifier, which works similarly to Dog's passive.

As mentioned, there's no quick way to get good Miner parts, but if you find them, notable ones are Collector (5*), Greed, Autoheal and No Faith.

If you have a craving for an even stronger miner, you can try to set up an auto-miner. Setting one up is a difficult process, as you need to get rid of all damaging skills (ideally all non-mining skills to waste less time, using consumables to leave just 1 skill), and then find a room with Tailwind (while frenzied and with no damaging skills). With no way to reroll skills, you can see that it's quite tedious. You may want to look into other mining jobs as their toolkits have different pros and cons for setting up, or just better gain ceilings.

If you have any questions you should join the official discord:
https://discord.gg/88wqBY8