Mining is exposing and extracting materials that lay deep in the earth. Most often these are ores or other precious natural resources. There are four general methods by which mining can be done.

Starting Basics

Most of Earth's crust is composed of Granite, Basalt, Limestone, Feldspar, Chert Calcite, Flint, Clay, Silt, Sand and Soil.

Any deposit you find will be listed as "Placer", "Exposed", "Buried" or "Deeply Buried". Placer deposits can be easy "panned" and exploited, though they are usually not as vast as other deposits. Exposed deposits can be strip mined. Deposits which are buried or deeply buried will require tunnel mining if you wish to exploit them.

The labor contributed by individuals working a in a mine will be represented in Mine Excavation Units or MEUs. Just how much material gets removed from a mine as the result of the total number of MEUs is determined by the type of mining being done and how hard the rock that makes up the surrounding earth is.

"Buried" and "Deeply Buried" deposits will have a "Reach Value". These scores represent how many cubic feet of material has to be mined away before the actual deposit is reached and exploited. The material that makes up the "Reach Value" will be classified as "soil", "hard clay" or "soft rock". When a deposit is "Buried", too reach values may be indicated. A lesser one to tunnel mine through and reach the deposit, or a larger one which can be dug completely away to bell pit mine the deposit. "Deeply Buried" deposits are so far down they can only effectively be tunnel mined. Placer and Exposed deposits do not have a Reach Value

Any mineral deposit will have a "Grade" indicated. The grade simply represents what percentage of the material extracted is actually the material you want. If your iron deposit has a 20% Grade, every 1 cubic foot of material you mine only contains 20% iron ore, thus you only get 1 Unit of iron ore for every 5 cubic ft of material extracted form that mine.

Any deposit found will have a "Host Material". If you find a mineral deposit such as Iron, which as a 30% "Grade", and has Limestone as it's "Host Material", this means that there is a large mass of Limestone with a 30% concentration of Iron ore in it. When you mine this mass, you get 30% Iron ore and 70% Limestone (in aggregate gravel like form). The type of Host Material will also indicate if the miners will be working with "hard rock" or "soft rock".

All mineral deposits are finite. Good miners and prospectors may be able to get a rough feeling for how big the "load" is. The exact size will be kept secret. Even small deposits can provide plenty of material for a small population over a long time. Large deposits have kept thousands of men busy for generations.

The Four Types of Mining

Placer Mining is more commonly know as "panning for gold". When an ore deposit is exposed to erosion from a moving stream or river, the moving water essentially mines the minerals by destroying the rock they are contained in and distributing the ore for miles along the water bed. The process is very slow, but by the time the deposit is discovered, the water way could have been doing it's work for dozens of years already. Miners simply have to go through the labor intensive process of sifting and panning through sand and muck to remove the metal, tiny nugget by tiny nugget. Compared to strip or tunnel mining this process is much safer. It also requires very few and simple tools. Improvised tools can be used at 100% effectiveness. Unfortunately, Placer mines are found rather than truly made. Though these sites are often developed by building housing and other amenities for workers near by, the "mine" is a natural geologic occurrence. Placer mines only exist for metals which do not rust such as gold, silver and tin. Generally speaking, when you find placer deposits, there is a load of that kind of ore upstream exposed to the surface. That is, unless it has already been completely eroded already.

Strip Mining can be done if the desired resources are "Exposed" to the surface. This technique simply digs into the deposit in a manner similar to quarrying. This work can be done efficiently by both Quarry workers and Miners. Unlike stone quarrying, it is faster because large blocks of stone need not be preserved to remove ore, but no usable stone brick it produced either.

Bell Pit Mining can be done to deposits that are "Buried". Like tunnel mining, you have to dig down to the deposit. Unlike tunnel mining, a very wide pit rather than a narrow shaft is dug down to the deposit. Though a lot more material has to be removed to reach the lode, it can be mined in a more efficient manner similar to strip mining, and with no risk of cave in. As miners dig outwards from the original pit, the circumference of the entire pit increases.

Tunnel Mining is carving a shaft into the earth and supporting those shafts to reach and extract the mineral resources there. Tunneling is dangerous work and can only be done by skilled Miners At least 50% of the workers must be miners of at least poor rank. Tunneling is not a task you want to be bad at with all the hazards involved. Though better miners do move more material faster, their biggest advantage is knowing where to mine and what steps will keep them most safe. Better miners have fewer accidents.

Labor Contribution

Mining like so many other industries in this system really has two sides to the equation. The first is the labor side. In this small section we will address how much work miners do. Later we will compare this to how much work needs doing to produce particular results. The labor contributed by individuals working a in a mine will be represented in Mine Excavation Units or MEUs. How many MEUs a person contributes will be denoted on the table below, based upon their profession. This amount is augmented by the tools they are supplied with.

Tools

Miners use a wide variety of tools to do their job. Picks, hammers, chisels and shovels are the most common, though buckets, baskets, ladders, ropes and pulleys are also common. Generally speaking, we will refer to any assortment of tools a miner need be equipped with as "Mining Tools" Each particular set of Mining Tools will likely have a small assortment of a few of these essentials. Any given set of Mining tools is generally not sufficient to operate an expansive operation, but several miners with the assortment of implements their various Mining Tools consist of will suffice for even large undertakings.

Mining Output

There are three primary factors which ultimately dictate how much material comes out of your mine. The first is how much labor is put into it as described above and represented in MEUs. The second is what type of mining method is being implemented (placer, strip or tunnel). Placer mining is easiest, followed by strip mining and then tunnel mining. Lastly, the hardness of the local rock has a huge impact on efficiency of mining. Harder rock requires a lot more effort to extract the same amount of material.

To determine how many cubic foot of material (units) are extracted from a mine in a given month, simply find how many MEUs are being contributed by your workers and divide by the number provided on the table below that best represents the mining situation. Realize that this is how much material is mined, not necessarily how much ore. Please consult the section above which details "Grade" and "Host Material" for more information on this.

Supporting a Tunnel Mine

Tunnel mining is far more dangerous than strip mining because workers are constantly working underneath thousands of pounds of rock that were once supported by the very earth the miners are digging away. In order to reduce the risk of a cave in, its common practice to use wooden supports along the mine tunnel. If you want to support your mine in this way, you must have at least one adept rank miner working the mine. Supporting the mine in this manner requires 25 units of timber or lumber for every 500 units of earth extracted from that mine. Actually building the support system is a very fast and efficient process and does not significantly detract from the productivity of the miners.

Wear and Tear of Tools

Mining puts a lot of stress and wear on tools. It's very common that tools become damaged, destroyed or lost. To represent this, 1 set of mining tools are considered to be destroyed for every 2000 MEUs used mining. These tools will have to be replaced, or a dramatic reduction in mining efficiency will occur.

"Fire Mining"

During the dark ages and the renaissance period, a rather unusual and ingenious method was employed to ease mining of hard rock in a tunnel mine. Miners would carry firewood into the mine and bundle it up close to a rock face they desired to breach. They would set a fire to heat the rock face to high temperatures. After the rock was good and hot, they would splash it with large amounts of cold water, such that the sudden change of temperature would cause the rock face to crack and rupture. Implementing "Fire Mining" for a month in your mine will reduce the Hard Rock Tunnel Mining rating of 50 to 45, but will do so at an expense of 25 units of firewood per miner, each month it is used.

Comparative Information

The table below gives some basic information about average deposits and how they occur in the real world. They are the guidelines used when various game world deposits are randomly generated. They are presented here to give players a sense of what to expect and a standard of comparison.

Examples

Deposit Example

A survey near the town of Eddington has discovered an iron deposit. The deposit is rated as "Deep", meaning that it is under a considerable amount of earth. It's "Host Material" is limestone (soft rock). The Grade of the Iron Ore in the deposit is 40% (above average). The material between the surface and the deposit is hard clay. The "Reach Value" of the deposit is 750 units if tunneled through, or 8000 units if strip mined.

Mining Operation Example

The Town of Eddington decides it wants to form a group of workers to exploit the local iron deposit described above. They have two adept ranked miners already, and they recruit an additional 18 general laborers. They invest by equipping all 20 men with standard mining tools. This gives them 6300 MEUs monthly. Because they have so many inexperienced miners, they decide they want to bel pit mine the deposit rather than try tunnel mining due to safety concerns (18 unskilled workers in a tunnel mine would be a disaster waiting to happen). An 8000 reach value really isn't all that bad through hard clay, and bell pit mining will be much more efficient in the long run. The first month passes and they remove 3150 of the 8000 reach value with their 6300 MEUs. The next month, they remove an additional 3150 of the 8000 reach value with their 6300 MEUs, leaving 1700. On the third month, the first 3400 MEUs of their 6300 finish off the remaining 1700 units of the reach value. The remaining 2900 MEUs this month go to mining the actual limestone / iron deposit. There mining soft rock in a bell pit mine now, which has a value of 12, therefore with their third month's remaining 2900 MEUs, they can extract 242 units of material from the mine. Because the deposit is 40% iron ore and 60% limestone, 97 units are iron ore and 145 are limestone gravel. On the forth month, the first month in which all effort is being fully directed at the actual deposit, the miner's 6300 MEUs result in 525 units of material being pulled from the mine. 210 units of this is iron ore, and 315 units of this are limestone gravel. Because this endeavor is utilizing about 6000 MEUs a month, 3 sets of mining tools are destroyed each month (1 for every 2000 MEUs) and need to be replaced.

Writer's Notes

Much of the data the above information is based on is very hard to find or completely nonexistent. Much of the above work is speculation, or drastically inferred from the limited information available.

Tunnel mining assumes a shaft dug 6 ft by 6 ft.

Digging to expose a deposit for bell pit mining assumes a 20ft by 20 ft pit to start.