Mine Hole
Build > Buildings & Construction > Mine Construction > Minehole
A Minehole functions like a cave entrance, leading you one level lower than your current one, allowing you to mine stone and ore or build an underground base. Naturally, the only way to reach levels deeper than Level 1 is to build a minehole in the preceding level.
Available metals are: Gold, Silver, Iron, Quicksilver, Copper, Lead and Tin.
How to Acquire
A mine hole requires a 3x3 area to be built.
On the sun-lit level a mine hole may be built anywhere where buildings like houses can be build.
On any other lower level its need to be build over the burned-out rubble of a Mine Pyre.
When a minehole is built, it will create a square 7x7 area of free space in the layer below it. Mind that you shouldn't place a minehole directly over an ore vein, as it will destroy some of it clearing space for the ladder.
You can build a Mine Elevator for easy access of items between levels.
Security Concern
A mine hole built inside your compound should be walled off with a Palisade or Brickwall as it is possible for raiders to tunnel into a mined area from elsewhere and gain entrance to a village or compound through an unsecured mine. Building a palisade and visitor gate (preferably 4 on all sides) on both the top and bottom of a minehole renders it mostly unraidable.
This is a common issue when people complain on forums that someone "bugraided" their "secure" base.
Notes
- See Mining page if you want to know how to mine.
- According to jorb: The minehole entrance (ladder) is a support with the same radius as a normal wooden support.
This means you can mine some tiles safely without having to build a support, thereby allowing to actually get some metal to construct one, if your mine hole was built over an ore node.
- Mines can now be built everywhere, but it's not guaranteed there will be ore. Use Rustroot Extract to prospect for ore nodes and construct mineholes over them to have instant access to metal.
- Since mine holes can be quite expensive early on it's usually a good idea to make sure there will be metals in the mine before you construct the mine hole.
- If you want to get the maximum amount of metal from your node, build the minehole away from the node and mine towards it; this prevents the minehole's area from deleting a part of the vein, saving you up to 49 tiles of ore.
- A Minehole may be built inside of a Cellar. Note that doing so will only have the Minehole go to the level below the one the house is built on, not below the level the cellar would theoretically be on, IE a house on the overworld will have its cellar minehole only go to cave level 1.
- If you get the message "The area below is occupied." make sure the 9x9 area below the intended mine hole is clear of player created objects. This includes stockpiles.
- When dropping down into an unknown area. Its wise to check if the mine hole tiles below are no water tiles.
- A certain locally varying strength (including equipment/gilding bonuses) is required to start building a mine hole, otherwise you will get a "the rock below is too hard for you to mine" message.
Game Development
- Swinish Alchemy (2024-11-24)◎ >"Mine Hole Ladders should now properly indicate the mine support radius they extend around them."
- World 13 (2021-04-02)◎ >"Access to lowest cave level is no longer dependent on meteoric iron."