Wish they would change how copper spawns

[Red Purger]

The bronze age is probably the worst grind in the game, aside from maybe silver. Except the main issue with silver lies in finding and transporting it, since it's very heavy, and found up in the mountains. The main issue with bronze is that you have to mine Copper, and copper spawns as a huge rock that takes multiple in-game days to dig out.
My issue isn't that it's hard to find, or that it's hard to mine, but that it's simply boring to do.

I wish they'd change the way copper spawns, from those giant boulders, to the medium sized ones that you can often find standing around the black forest. That way you have to hunt around for them. It would break the monotony of mining one gigantic rock.

[adritheonly]

What! No greydwarves or Trolls to keep you company and, especially in the case of Trolls, help you mine? Bummer!

[jonnin]

mining goes faster and faster as you upgrade both your pick and your skill. After a while you can break them up quickly, but the first couple can be tedious for sure.
That said your idea is kinda cool -- I like the idea of smaller ore deposits that make you move around instead of digging one great big hole. At least tin is like that, and its kinda fun to mine, on the move, so you get 1/2 your wish. Each metal has its own special way to get it, and unfortunately, copper is the big boring dig site.

[FDru]

Origineel geplaatst door jonnin:

mining goes faster and faster as you upgrade both your pick and your skill.

Yeah but not much... it also takes a long time to level up mining skill.

Anyway I have to agree that copper sucks. Silver isn't a whole lot better but at least silver veins are easier to "pop" and basically you need 6 veins and then you're done (until later when you might need some more but only a few, which you probably have leftover from crafting your mountain gear anyway).

[Cattastrafy]

I'll probably never play without casual portals again for this reason. Makes life a lot more enjoyable.

Also I just scalp mine, life's too short to dig the entire thing out.

But yeah copper grind sucks, at least I feel black forest has some substance unlike the mountains. I go there, mine some silver, and it's off to the plains in a blink. Almost wish frost caves had something "required" for progression, cause I don't usually make fenris armor. And due to developer incompetence not giving us multiple fist weapons (or the plethora of other missing weapons), not much reason to play with 'rippers imo.

[FDru]

Origineel geplaatst door Cattastrafy:

I don't usually make fenris armor.

It's so good though... it took me 20 frost caves to get a cultist trophy but I'm so glad I did. Where I used to fear gjalls, I now eagerly hunt them down as soon as hear their stupid noises :p

[Cattastrafy]

Origineel geplaatst door FDru:

Origineel geplaatst door Cattastrafy:

I don't usually make fenris armor.

It's so good though... it took me 20 frost caves to get a cultist trophy but I'm so glad I did. Where I used to fear gjalls, I now eagerly hunt them down as soon as hear their stupid noises :p

I'm considering making the legs most play throughs now haha.

But I'm just more of a full heavy tank kinda guy most the time. I did go full fenris recently for all of the plains in a play through, was fun enough.

[knighttemplar1960]

You don't have to mine out the entire deposit but your way would slow things down further. You would have to prep multiple deposits for mining instead of 2 or 3. Plus you can all ready do it the way you want to by just taking off the exposed part of the deposit and leaving the buried part buried. No extra digging required, you just have to find lots of copper deposits instead of a couple of them.

You can use the tools available to speed up the process. If you take your hoe along with your antler pick you can use the hoe to level ground. The pick removes 1 meter of earth in 3-4 strikes. The hoe flattens 6-9 meters of earth in one tap.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3266806371
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3266808448
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3266806245
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3266805922

30 IRL minutes is all it took to mine out this entire deposit (I used the honey as a timer and went through 2 of them) including dealing with the occasional greydwarves. It took me longer to sail it back to my base in my karve than it did to mine it.

I usually locate the closest deposit and take just what I need to make nails for the Karve and my bronze pick. Then I look for deposits near the shore so I can carry the ore to my boat and sail it home.

Silver seems faster for 2 reasons. The deposits are smaller and result in about 95 silver ore when mined out instead of the 120ish you get from copper and you have both a better pick and higher mining skill.

Transporting silver is easy. Let gravity do the work for you. Load a cart up with ore and push it over the edge or just toss the ore over the edge and put it in a cart at the foot of the mountain. The trick with the hoe works with silver just not as well because none of the silver vein is typically exposed and you have to dig the entire thing out.

In game terms the mining is "kind of" accurate. Real copper and silver deposits are only about 1% copper or silver ore. To get to 99% purity it had to go through 4 separate smelting steps. So IRL most of what you got was waste stone. IRL alluvial tin deposits (those found by rivers) are much purer than hard rock colluvial deposits (usually found mixed in with granite). Some rich alluvial deposits are all most pure tin and you can find large pure nuggets by panning the same as you can for gold.

[Gisbert]

I really don't know why so many people hate this game stage. Personally, I like it most as the best part of the game.

Have you ever tried to mine it like that?
1. It's so statisfying when the whole thing collapses at the end.
2. If you play solo, you only need to find 2-3 copper deposits and you're practically through.
3. While excavating mines, you can build small outposts for pre-processing and later transportation.
4. Building small paths for the carts and organizing the transport while your carrots have to grow anyway can be so much fun.

The whole “stone age” to “bronze age” path is so beautifully slow and rewarding.
Why rush? You can take your time and enjoy the game instead.
However, if you mine the copper deposits directly in the vicinity but as a whole, you don't need many and save a lot of time that would go into “transportation”.

I mean, what else do you play Valheim for?

Just try it, dig down completely and once all the way through - the whole thing also gets a "mine feeling". You don't have to mine all the copper till you can proceed, you can process it in the meantime once you've collected 20 copper, craft the cultivator and expand the base around your field, the forge, etc.

[Gisbert]

Origineel geplaatst door knighttemplar1960:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3266806371
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3266808448
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3266806245
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3266805922

You don't dig through the ground like I do, the result seems nearly the same, just without the “mine look”.

I don't necessarily need much longer either, apart from the fact that I simply take my time, but I would also like to try this “trick”.

I think it's based on the fact that everything “under the ground” is counted as “in the air” - enginesided.

Can you please explain more detailed what exactly you do with the “hoe” and the “pick” to make this work and what are the chances of this “working” or is this a 100% one apart from the practice I need?

The reason why I'm also very fast is once I've dug a cavern under the copper, I can place a fire and have +300% stamina regen, you really don't need to wait for stamina.
But apart from the time factor, the whole mining process doesn't feel tedious this way.

[Red Purger]

It's not so much that I hate it, but rather I just think it's boring. I feel it could be improved to be more engaging. Even if it takes longer, like having to run around more, it would at least be fun, and you'd get to explore around and fight enemies while collecting it.

I also had this idea about putting small amounts of scrap bronze in burial chambers, to provide an alternative source of bronze in the early game. Just small quantities, maybe in a pile of ancient armor or something, that you would have to mine with the pickaxe to obtain.

[knighttemplar1960]

Origineel geplaatst door Gisbert:

Origineel geplaatst door knighttemplar1960:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3266806371
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3266808448
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3266806245
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3266805922

You don't dig through the ground like I do, the result seems nearly the same, just without the “mine look”.

I don't necessarily need much longer either, apart from the fact that I simply take my time, but I would also like to try this “trick”.

I think it's based on the fact that everything “under the ground” is counted as “in the air” - enginesided.

Can you please explain more detailed what exactly you do with the “hoe” and the “pick” to make this work and what are the chances of this “working” or is this a 100% one apart from the practice I need?

The reason why I'm also very fast is once I've dug a cavern under the copper, I can place a fire and have +300% stamina regen, you really don't need to wait for stamina.
But apart from the time factor, the whole mining process doesn't feel tedious this way.

The same thing you do when flattening terrain at your base to make a garden or a foundation for a building. Pick down 1 meter, stand in the hole, and flatten. The terrain tries to drop to the level you are standing. As long as the terrain is no more than 2 meters above where you are standing it will flatten instead of creating a ridge (see my first screen shot). Go all the way around the deposit, pick down one meter and repeat. The interior of the copper deposit contains earth (as you can see from my third screen shot) and because of the way the copper deposits spawn they go all the way down 8 meters at the edges from where the top of the deposit starts. About 10% of them go below the terrain modification floor and can't be mined out fully which is why copper deposits rarely pop the way silver ones do.

The easiest copper deposits to mine out are the ones that are on the edges of rivers since most of the ore is revealed to begin with.

[darktom222(fr)]

a ore of copper take me 10 to 15 min i jsut take most of it without taking everything in the same day i farm copepr and tin i go back and restart until im ok

[pipo.p]

Origineel geplaatst door knighttemplar1960:

In game terms the mining is "kind of" accurate. Real copper and silver deposits are only about 1% copper or silver ore. To get to 99% purity it had to go through 4 separate smelting steps. So IRL most of what you got was waste stone. IRL alluvial tin deposits (those found by rivers) are much purer than hard rock colluvial deposits (usually found mixed in with granite). Some rich alluvial deposits are all most pure tin and you can find large pure nuggets by panning the same as you can for gold.

Did native copper pebbles and open-air deposits not exist anymore during Viking times? I mean, the much earlier Copper age wasn't about 1% rich copper oxyd ore, was it?

[knighttemplar1960]

Origineel geplaatst door pipo.p:

Origineel geplaatst door knighttemplar1960:

In game terms the mining is "kind of" accurate. Real copper and silver deposits are only about 1% copper or silver ore. To get to 99% purity it had to go through 4 separate smelting steps. So IRL most of what you got was waste stone. IRL alluvial tin deposits (those found by rivers) are much purer than hard rock colluvial deposits (usually found mixed in with granite). Some rich alluvial deposits are all most pure tin and you can find large pure nuggets by panning the same as you can for gold.

Did native copper pebbles and open-air deposits not exist anymore during Viking times? I mean, the much earlier Copper age wasn't about 1% rich copper oxyd ore, was it?

Open air deposits are extremely rare. Native copper pebbles (malachite) is about 57% copper but its not found in Europe. Its found in Russia, South Africa, the North American Southwest, Keweenaw peninsula in Michigan, and the coast of Maine. Copper in Sweden would have come from the Aitik mine. Its richness is 0.38% copper.

The copper that drove the Copper and Bronze ages came mostly from the Island of Cyprus. Its richness was about 4%. (The tin that drove the bronze age came from Cornwall. The Casserite deposits in Cornwall are about 57.8% tin). The other sources of copper around the Med like Attica, Thrace, and Anatollia were all 1% or less. So was the Parys Mountain mine in north-west Wales. The Escondida mine in Chile is the largest copper mine in the world today and it supplies about 23% of all the copper produced world wide. Its richness is only 0.54%.

There are 2 notable exceptions. The Bingham Canyon mine just outside Salt Lake City is 10% copper ore and the richness of the copper in the Kennecott mill just outside Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve in McCarthy Alaska is a whopping 75% pure in some locations. Most of it is 40% copper ore and 60% limestone.

In the bronze age it took 3 men working 12 hours to mine and pre-smelt a plug of 50% pure copper about the size of the tip of your pinkie finger.

[lumina]

The problem seems to be your method of digging then. It's faster to just mine the copper than to try digging under it and making it all collapse, if that's what you're doing here. And it definitely shouldn't take you multiple in game days to clear a deposit. Are you transporting it back little by little as your inventory gets full? I usually just setup a bench and chest right next to the deposit, mine the entire thing, then use a cart to bring it all back. You also don't really need that much of it overall. I usually have my main base near some black forest, and get by just clearing the closest 2-3 deposits. But I'm also just getting to Plains, so maybe you need more later again?