Mining Leveling Guide

Overview

Miners dig ore out of veins and melt it into bars at a forge. Those bars are the raw material of Blacksmithing and Engineering, and a few Enchanting and Tailoring recipes ask for them as well. With a pick costing a few copper as the only expense, Mining is one of the safest ways to earn gold.

• Good partners: Blacksmithing or Engineering to spend your own bars, or Herbalism for two incomes. Only one resource can be tracked at a time, so a double gatherer alternates between Find Minerals and Find Herbs.
• Race and class: no racial trait touches Mining in Forever. Druids avoid fights with Prowl and Travel Form; Hunters and Warlocks park a pet on the guard, and Hunters can Feign Death to leave combat.
• Camp items: the Lodestone (skill 20) adds a melee Attack Power buff to a campfire, a weaker Blessing of Might that does not stack with the Paladin spell.

Where to Learn Mining

In the starting areas, an early quest also offers Mining for Dummies as a reward, which teaches Apprentice Mining directly. Click a waypoint to copy it, then paste it in chat.

Leveling by Smelting (1-185)

Smelting gives Mining points up to 185, so you can buy ore and never leave the forge, mine everything yourself, or blend the two depending on prices. Beyond 185 only veins give points.

Ore to buy

130 Copper Ore, 60 Tin Ore, 70 Silver Ore, 35 Iron Ore and 60 Gold Ore.

• Copper stops being worth it at 65. Keep 60 of the bars for the bronze step.
• Tin is grey from 75, but smelt all 60 ore anyway: the bronze needs the bars.
• Smelt Copper is yellow from 25 and green from 47, which is why 65 points take about 130 smelts.

Leveling by Mining (1-300)

Copper Veins are all you can mine at first. Tin opens at 65, Silver at 75 and Iron at 125, each one a reason to move to a higher zone. Tin stops giving points at 165 and Silver at 175, right when Mithril becomes available.

A vein takes several swings to empty but yields at most one skill point. The rows above 225 are built from the node thresholds in the table further down and could not be walked under the beta level cap.

Tools & Boosts

A Mining Pick in your bags is the only requirement; every Trade Goods vendor stocks it. Turn on Find Minerals to show veins on the minimap.

Skill boosts

Bonus skill lets you open a vein early. With +5, a Silver Vein becomes minable at 70 instead of 75.

Other mining gear

• Smelting Pants cut the cast time of Smelt Copper, Tin, Bronze and Silver by 25%.
• Rockslicer lets any character, miner or not, work Copper, Tin, Silver and Iron nodes. It drops with 30 charges.

Ore Veins

The four values are the skill at which a node is orange, yellow, green and finally grey (no more points).

Smelting Bars

Bars are made at a forge; every capital and many villages have one. A smelt that is no longer orange often needs several casts for a single point. Values are the skill for orange / yellow / green / grey, and a dash means the stage does not exist for that bar.

New in Forever

• New metals for endgame recipes: Azerothium Bar, Heavy Thorium Bar (from the new Heavy Thorium Ore) and Legionite Bar. For now Legionite seems to exist only as an Alchemy transmute of Heavy Thorium Bars, and where the new ore spawns is unknown.
• Scarce materials can come out of a vein with the ore: Pyrite, Bauxite and Pitchblende. Their drop rates and source veins are not documented yet; Pitchblende is what Smelt Azerothium consumes.
• Camp items: the Rock Garden slowly spawns a common ore node at the camp, and the Molten Foundry is a workstation.