To mine you need shovels or pickaxes. You can mine almost every mountain and in every cave.

Mining is also important when smelting armor and weapons. A 50-skill miner can recover about 30% of the ingots required to make the item, a GM miner can recover approx. 66%.

Gargoyles pickaxes:
Stone gargoyles sometimes carry "a gargoyle pickaxe", also known as "a large pickaxe of ore extraction" when identified. These pickaxes allow a miner to extract ore 1-2 levels above what a mine usually contains, and have twice the durability of normal pickaxes

There is also a chance to spawn a ore elemental. These tough elementals have 25 large piles of the ore-type they're made of as loot. The more precious ones (valorite) can be very though, they've a special gas attack and are almost completely magic resistant.

There are 3 sizes of ore: Small, medium and large piles.

• 1 Large ore = 2 ingots (12 stones)
• 1 Medium ore = 1 ingot (7 stones)
• 1 small ore = 1/2 ingots (2 stones)
• 1 Large = 2 medium = 4 small

You can turn large ore into smaller piles, but you can't change small ore back to large ore. Since a stack of ore becomes much lighter when you change it from large to small, it helps to carry some small pieces of ore around with you and turn all the ore that you mine into small piles. To merge two piles simply click the first one and target the second one.

Ore (mines and mountains) respawn approx. every 20 minutes. The type of ore that can be found in one location always remains the same, but it varies between shards. Ore spawns in resource squares (8x8 tile areas), and mining anywhere in that square will take ore from the same vein. There are maps for UO Auto Map that have these squares already drawn in, which makes mining much easier. One square can have up to 16 large ore (32 ingots).

Mining strategies

• Shovels: Buy shovels from NPC tinkers, they are cheaper to buy than to make.
• Packhorse mining: One packhorse can carry
  • 133 large ore @ 12 stone (266 ingots)
  • 228 small ore @ 7 stone (228 ingots)
  • 800 small ore @ 2 stone (400 ingots)
  Packhorse mining is not recommended in felucca, as pets can be attacked and killed by anyone without having to take a murder count. You should be able to gate to packhorse mine.
• Recall mining: Mark a few mining locations, and then recall to one, mine until you're at your weight limit, recall to a forge and smelt. This is mostly used to mine valorite and similar mines.
• Leap-frogging: Drag your iron ore stack behind you as you make your way around a mountain or through a cave.
• Gate-mining: After mining a lot of ore (see previous method), instead of leap-frogging it to a forge you can use a gate to transport it.
  • With the ore next to you, cast gate travel to your house (or a bank, forge etc.)
  • Standing on top of the gate, Double click it. (the gate is now your LastObject).
  • On the other side, take one step forward and WALK back into the gate. It is important that you do NOT click the gate (or anything else for that matter.)
  • You're now back in the mine over the gate, with the ore next to you. Pick up all the ore and hold it. If you walked too far, cast teleport and tele on top of the gate.
  • Press your LastObject macro to "use" the gate and go back through. You are going to have to press it a couple of times since you've to wait a few seconds before re-entering a gate.
  • You should now be back on the other side of the gate, with all the ore still on your cursor. Either bank it, or drop it and smelt it.

The best way to mine the ore is via a UOA macro. Go inside a mine, start recording, use a shovel and target the location where you're standing. Now stop recording and change the first line to 'item type' and the target line to 'target relative location.' Add a pause after the target, depending on how lagged you are (500-1500 ms.)

When you're smelting your ore and you fail, you lose 50% of the ore. It's therefore safer to smelt valuable ore one at a time, or at least in smaller amounts, especially when you've a few hundred piles of ore and failing smelting would mean losing a few hundred ingots.

Skill training

You should only smelt the easiest ore immediately and store agapite/verite/valorite for your powerhour.

You can get excellent gains smelting those types one at a time in powerhour, since smelting is difficulty based. When doing this, turn all your ore into medium or small piles, and smelt 2 small (or 1 medium) at a time.

Tips & Tricks

• Don't carry anything unnecessary (armor, potions, lots of regs), ore is heavy and you want to be able to carry as much as possible.

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Version 1.0: Initial draft
Version 1.1: Fixed html
Version 1.2: Changes ore sizes/smelting.