Guides/Mining/Sand Mining

Overview

Gems (and coal) are acquired when ore stones in a mine are broken (by being used in 7 workloads). The size of the gem is random. There is some evidence to suggest that when more ore stones are broken in the same set and/or workload, the gem sizes on average tend to be larger; however, it's still perfectly possible to pull a Huge gem without exploiting this. Sand mines are thus valuable for gem mining, as it's easy to plan in such a way as to break 5+ nodes at once (assuming there are 5 different colors present in the field).

Below are some step-by-step guides for how to get the most gems per workload for various workload configurations.

For the basic mechanics of mining, please refer to the Mining Guide.

Workload Configurations

Six Colors

For a workload distribution of 5 single colors, and then 1 pairs of colors, you can achieve the crumbling of all seven ore stones by following the pattern as laid out below:

Sets A-1, B, C, F A-1, D, E A-1, C, D, E A-1, B, F A-1, D, E, F A-1, B, C A-1, B, E, F This workload will crumble stone A-1 A-2, C, D A-2, D, E A-2, B, C, F A-2, C, F A-2, B, E, D A-2, B, E This workload will crumble stone B & E A-2, C, D, F This workload will crumble the remaining stones

Five Colors - Configuration 1

For a workload distribution of 3 single colors, and then 2 pairs of colors, you can achieve the crumbling of all seven ore stones by following the pattern as laid out below:

Sets C, D, E C, A-1, B-1 C, A-1, B-2 C, A-2, B-1 C, A-2, B-2 D, A-1, B-1 D, A-1, B-2 D, A-2, B-1 D, A-2, B-2 E, A-1, B-1 E, A-1, B-2 E, A-2, B-1 E, A-2, B-2 A-1, B-1, C, D, E This workload will crumble stones A-1 & B-1 A-2, B-2, C, D, E This workload will crumble the remaining stones

Five Colors - Alternate Method

Using the theory that gem size is tied to the number of stones broken in a single workload (as opposed to the number of total stones broken in a field), the above can be simplified to do a little less work and still get the big break that will be producing most of the big gems.

Refer to the above image.

First, choose one of the duplicate-colored stones to ignore completely. Here we'll choose B-2. Then pick one of the stones in the remaining pair (say, A-1) to be your starter stone. Make any valid 3-stone workload starting with your starter stone, and immediately follow that with the workload consisting of the remaining 3 stones. There are exactly 6 sets of these pairs of workloads. Do them all.

A-1, C, D	A-2, B-1, E
A-1, C, B-1	A-2, D, E
A-1, C, E	A-2, D, B-1
A-1, D, B-1	A-2, C, E
A-1, D, E	A-2, C, B-1
A-1, B-1, E	A-2, C, D

And finally choose a 5-stone workload (either A-1 or A-2 in addition to B-1, C, D, and E).

The same process can be applied to 6- and 7-color fields. Make 6 sets of complementary pairs of workloads, and then break them all.