Question about metal nodes:

[Gunther Ultrabolt Novacrunch]

Can someone explain to me the mechanics and conditions that are in play when a mining node (silver or copper) just "explodes".

I know you can dig around both and leave them completely suspended in air (they won't collapse on their own like stone monoliths and boulders).

I'm looking for definitive answers and not theories.

[stvlepore]

I went back and tried a few copper just to see. I could not get one to explode until I was 90% done. I cleared around it, cleared the top of any rocks etc. I then went through the bottom from one side to the other, clearing out all the stone. Then I halved the two sides. Cleared everything from the bottom. So all copper is floating. Then i would hit the lowest hanging bit of the node. Did all I could reach from the ground, then started using ladders. Even some small ones broke into 3 smaller parts, not yielding any ore though.
Tried another by clearing the bottom then mining from the top, but all you do is fall through.
Then went to the mountains and did two silver, Both 100% exploded after clearing the rock and striking the very end tip on the first try. I have no idea why copper won't. It used too......

[DivineEvil]

Perhaps it has something to do with connections between the separate segments of the node. Maybe if you break one segment, and that leaves adjacent segments to remain only connected to another such segment and they then chain-react to collapse? Or maybe silver node segments are not connected the same way as the copper node is? So even though they look fused they aren't support each-other as tighly as it seems?

That's all of course speculations - not something OP have asked for, so I concede.

[Rickson]

Every breakable chunk of ore in a vein has a bounding box that is generally much larger than the piece appears to be. It's as big as it needs to be in every dimension to form a rectangle around the entire piece. All of those boxes that are touching each other need to be completely disconnected from the ground to explode the entire deposit/vein. Even after that you sometimes still have to destroy a piece so the game updates the deposit then actually explodes. There's a mod called "ore support" that you can use to display the ore bounding boxes. Generally the process is not worth it for copper, I haven't tried with silver but it should work better there. Mining massive amounts of stone from the plains pillars is really the only time it's reliable enough to use.

[jonnin]

its gravity.
if you take out the bottom floor of a wooden tower out in the wild, what happens? It takes a min because the engine is weird, but then it falls apart into pieces.
if you bust out the bottom of a huge rock in the plains, it rains rocks for like 30 seconds after, same thing -- its as if you busted it up, caused by 'falling damage'. Its just how the game works, if its floating, it falls apart into its pieces after a short delay.
ore is just like a rock, only it gives ore :)
the only thing that does not really bust up are trees, they land intact so you can spend energy chopping at them. No amount of falling seems to work for auto logging.

computers being computers and code being code, though, one pixel is enough to support tons of rock.

[rexpiscator]

Silver is very easy to dig out the entire node, Copper...not-so-much. Either you hit the depth threshold or it's underside is under water....

[Mharr]

You can use https://valheim.thunderstore.io/package/JereKuusela/Ore_Support to make the hitboxes visible, they are cubic and larger than the actual model. Detonation will occur after mining any section if no part of the hitbox is intersecting the ground.

This can also happen if the entire model is below the surface, in which case the ore will spawn on the ground above. This can be easier to achieve than digging the whole thing out, especially in the case of copper.

[Gunther Ultrabolt Novacrunch]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Mharr:

You can use https://valheim.thunderstore.io/package/JereKuusela/Ore_Support to make the hitboxes visible, they are cubic and larger than the actual model. Detonation will occur after mining any section if no part of the hitbox is intersecting the ground.

This can also happen if the entire model is below the surface, in which case the ore will spawn on the ground above. This can be easier to achieve than digging the whole thing out, especially in the case of copper.

This sounds legit. I"m gonna mark this as my answer and eventually test it myself (for science)

Thanks guys.

[Mharr]

I say cubic, they're divided at a higher 'resolution' vertically, so the overall shape is like something built from Minecraft slabs.

[Ǵ̶͓̂͑lí̴̤̀̄́tcĥ̸]

Didn't realize how oldschool they went with those hitboxes for the stones, lol. It's been a while since I played around with engines (mostly UE3) and I remember back then using auto convex collision to set up more accurate hitboxes instead of the simple box or pill collision stuff (or stacking multiple box collision overlaps) - same could be used for hitboxes (non-collision) iirc, especially on static objects like stones. I'd say all them verts might hog resources, but stacking boxes each of which has 8 verts and they'd add up to about the same as a simple convex I'd think - and besides, no spheres in Unity? They did it with the actual collision...dunno anyway, sorry, speculation.

Every ore I attempted via the method I stated has successfully exploded, but I guess I luckily cleared out the dirt touching the hitboxes without knowing. I tried to make sure I could walk all the way around them aside from underneath, so who knows, maybe that's it.