Mining

Mining pulls ore out of mountainsides and cave floors. Smelt the ore at a forge to get ingots, the raw material for Blacksmithy and other crafting. Every swing of the pick also has a small chance to turn up a gem.

Mining is one of the four gathering skills — see the Gathering Overview for how resource spots, respawns and town bonuses work across all of them.

Getting Started ↑ top

1. Buy a pickaxe (blacksmiths and provisioners sell them, or craft your own).
2. Double-click the tool — "Where do you wish to dig?"
3. Target a mountainside or cave floor within 2 tiles.

A few rules:

• The tool must be in your hands or your backpack — a pickaxe must be equipped or held for serious mining.
• You can mine while mounted on UO Sagas (a community-voted change — most shards don't allow it).
• You cannot mine while polymorphed into a non-human form.

Each successful dig yields ore and uses up one charge on your tool. Each spot in the world holds a limited amount of ore; once you dig it dry, it refills after roughly 5–10 minutes.

Tools ↑ top

Mining uses two tools, and each does one job: the pickaxe cuts rock, the shovel digs sand, and neither will do the other's.

The pickaxe ↑ top

Ore and granite come out with a pickaxe, which holds 50 uses when bought from a vendor, 100 when a tinker made it, 150 if it came out exceptional. It doubles as a one-handed weapon — its swings use your Mining skill for accuracy, so a miner is never entirely unarmed underground.

One use is consumed per successful dig — failed attempts don't wear the tool. When the last use is spent the tool breaks. See Repairing for keeping gear alive in general — but note harvest tools are consumed, not repaired.

A pickaxe's metal does not change its uses — it changes what comes out of the ground. A colored pick (a Tinkering commission, 20 ingots) shifts the vein roll: Bronze is the neutral tier that digs the raw location odds, cheaper metals lean the roll a little toward plain ore, Verite and Valorite lean it toward the rare tiers. The pickaxe's tooltip states its tendency as Rare veins:

	Pickaxe	Rare veins (tooltip)	Mining bonus (up to)
	Iron	Unlikely	—
	Shadow Iron	Slim	Accurate (+5)
	Copper	Moderate	Surpassingly (+10)
	Bronze	Fair (neutral)	Eminently (+15)
	Verite	Good	Exceedingly (+20)
	Valorite	Excellent	Supremely (+25)

The last column is a second perk: a colored pickaxe also rolls an accuracy prefix at craft time — Accurate through Supremely — and that prefix grants bonus Mining skill while the pick is equipped (+5 per accuracy level). The metal caps how high the prefix can roll — the column shows each tier's best case; the actual level is luck of the craft.

The shovel ↑ top

The shovel digs sand, and nothing else: it will not touch a rock face, and a pickaxe will not touch sand. It holds 100 uses and is bought, not crafted: tinkers cannot make one. That is twice what a vendor pickaxe carries, which offsets not being able to commission a better one. The Glassblower stocks them, and his first quest hands you one to start with.

Unlike the pickaxe, a shovel has no Rare veins line on its tooltip and takes no benefit from coloured metal. There is only one kind of sand, so there are no tiers for a better tool to shift the roll between. It also needs no free hand: a shovel works straight out of your backpack.

Digging sand at all takes Grandmaster Mining and the Finding Glass-Quality Sand book (see Sand below). Without the book, double-clicking a shovel does not even offer you a target.

Auto-targeting ↑ top

Auto-targeting also skips spots that are already dug out. A stripped vein looks exactly like a fresh one, so the search checks what is actually left in each spot and walks on to the next one in range, so you keep working instead of hammering an empty wall.

See Gathering Overview.

Ore Types ↑ top

UO Sagas is a Renaissance-era shard, so ore comes in six tiers. (Dull Copper, Gold and Agapite do not exist here.)

	Ore	Skill to mine	Notes
	Iron	0	Everywhere; the only ore in towns
	Shadow Iron	60
	Copper	80
	Bronze	100
	Verite	110	Requires skill above Grandmaster
	Valorite	120	Requires the full 120 skill cap

"Skill to mine" is the minimum to pull that ore at all; your actual success chance keeps improving well past that point, so even at the requirement you will fail often.

Where the Good Ore Is ↑ top

Every mining spot has a hidden vein type that decides which ore it gives. The odds depend on where you are:

	Ore	Overland	In town	Dungeon level 1	Dungeon level 2	Dungeon level 3
	Iron	75%	100%	40%	25%	10%
	Shadow Iron	15%	—	30%	33%	31%
	Copper	9.3%	—	21.6%	30.2%	42.5%
	Bronze	0.4%	—	4.2%	5.9%	8.3%
	Verite	0.2%	—	2.8%	3.9%	5.5%
	Valorite	0.1%	—	1.4%	2.0%	2.7%

The deeper the dungeon, the better the veins — serious miners work dungeon caves, not the mountains outside town.

Luck Helps ↑ top

Positive Luck gives a chance to bump a vein up one tier before you dig it — "You stumbled across a better ore vein out of sheer luck." The chance grows with your Luck, and shrinks at every step up the ladder — an Iron→Shadow bump is the most common by far, a Verite→Valorite one the rarest, and that top step needs 50+ Luck before it can fire at all. Luck upgrades never trigger inside towns.

Gems ↑ top

While mining ore you can also turn up gems. Each gem type has its own small chance per successful dig once your Mining skill is high enough:

	Gem	Mining skill needed
	Amber	50
	Amethyst	60
	Emerald	70
	Sapphire	80
	Ruby	90
	Diamond	100

See Gems for what they're used for.

Granite ↑ top

Granite is workable stone: the raw material for Masonry, the stonecrafting trade that carves vases, stone tables and statues. It comes out of the same veins as ore, but only for a miner who has been taught to see it.

You need three things:

• Grandmaster Mining (100).
• The book Mining for Quality Stone, which is the reward of the Stone Crafter's first quest (see Quests). No vendor sells it.
• Your pickaxe switched over. Left-click the pick and choose Set to Ore and Stone; the same menu switches you back to ore only, and the pick's tooltip states which mode you are in. It is a character setting, not a property of one tool: flip it once and every mining tool you own follows, including one you buy tomorrow.

A server restart puts everyone back to ore only. If you have been finding granite and it suddenly dries up, check the pick's tooltip. You have almost certainly been switched back, and turning it on again takes a click.

With the switch on, granite turns up alongside the ore, never instead of it, and it costs the vein nothing: a stone find does not eat into what the spot still holds. The granite matches the vein you are working, so a valorite vein gives valorite granite.

It is not free, though. While you are set to Ore and Stone, your ore yield is halved. The vein is still debited in full, so a spot worked in stone mode simply gives you half the metal before it runs dry. Town harvest bonuses are paid on that reduced amount, and the in-game message says so. Switch back to ore only whenever you are mining for ingots.

Granite turns up now and then rather than on demand: a fair haul over a session, not a swing-by-swing thing. The richer the vein, the more readily it gives stone up: valorite and verite part with granite far more often than plain iron does, which makes a deep dungeon vein worth far more to a stonecrafter than an overworld one. Suspected unattended (AFK) gatherers get no granite at all.

Sand ↑ top

Sand is the material for Glassblowing, and it is dug from beaches and desert rather than cut from rock.

Sand needs a shovel, and only a shovel. A pickaxe cannot dig sand, and a shovel will not touch ore or stone; each tool now does one job. You also need Grandmaster Mining and the book Finding Glass-Quality Sand, the reward of the Glassblower's first quest. Without the book the shovel does not even offer you a target: it simply tells you to go and learn first.

Shovels are bought from vendors: the Glassblower sells them, and the quest hands you one to start with. They cannot be tinkered. A shovel shows no Rare veins line on its tooltip and gets no benefit from coloured metal, because sand has only one kind: there are no tiers to shift the roll between. Sand spots refill on the same 5–10 minute timer as ore.

Smelting Ore into Ingots ↑ top

Double-click a pile of ore and target a forge. You can also target another pile of the same ore to combine the two stacks.

Each pile of mined ore smelts into 2 ingots per ore. Failure burns away part of the pile — "You burn away the impurities but are left with less useable metal."

Smelting rolls your Mining skill. Reliable smelting needs:

Ore	Ingot	Metal	Skill for a chance	Skill to never fail
		Iron	any	30
		Shadow Iron	35	65
		Copper	50	80
		Bronze	65	95
		Verite	80	110
		Valorite	95	125

Copper ore and above are refused outright if the required smelting skill is above your Mining — "You have no idea how to smelt this strange ore!" Iron and Shadow Iron can always be attempted.

The Mining Damage Bonus ↑ top

Mining is not only a gathering skill. Two weapons swing harder in your hands:

• Hammer pick and war axe deal bonus damage that scales with your Mining, about +20% at Grandmaster (100) and +24% at 120 against monsters. In PvP the bonus is half as strong (+10% at 100, +12% at 120).
• Scrolled points count in full here, PvP flag or not, so Mining is one of the few gathering scrolls that pays out in player combat.

No other weapon benefits: the pickaxe itself is an axe, so it takes the Lumberjacking bonus instead. See Weapons for where these two fit.

Tips ↑ top

• Stealth mining: a hidden miner with Stealth over 100 can roll to stay hidden while working a vein. The chance scales from 0% at 100 Stealth up toward 120 — fail the roll and you're revealed.
• Ore elementals do not spawn from mining on UO Sagas — dig in peace.
• Town citizenship bonuses can double your yield and speed up skill gain in specific regions — see Citizenship and Citizen Quests (gathering quests can be filled straight from your pick via the tool's Quest Gathering toggle).
• Mining has its own Skill Mastery with perks for double yield, tool preservation, tier upgrades and the Motherlode proc.

Town Quests for miners ↑ top

Related ↑ top

• Town Quests — the Miner's gathering quests
• Gathering Overview
• Lumberjacking · Fishing · Skinning
• Masonry: what granite is for
• Glassblowing: what sand is for
• Quests: the two chains that teach stone and sand mining
• Crafting Overview · Crafting Resources