Welcome to Elderfield Mining Guide

Last updated: 2026-09-26 · 11 min read

The first time a node refuses to break, it looks like a bug. It is not. Elderfield gates ore by pickaxe tier rather than by how deep you have walked, so a Rusty Pickaxe swings uselessly at Iron in the Mall while the same tool has no trouble with Copper two rooms away. This page maps every ore to the pickaxe it demands, the four mines that hold them, and the coal bill waiting on the other side of the furnace. Mining is also the only reliable source of the Copper-to-Platinum metals that weapon and armour upgrades run on, which is why the loop feeds almost every other system in the game.

Getting a Pickaxe

The pickaxe is not missable and it is not really bought, at least not the first one. Molly in the Town Outskirts hands over the Rusty Pickaxe as the reward for her task "Helping Molly", which asks only that you mine a Copper Ore in the local mine and bring it back. That single errand opens mining, the Workshop and the Furnace at the same time, and it is the reason the Beginner Mine exists.

The Rusty Pickaxe is Mining Lv 1, and in practice it only bites in the Beginner Mine. Iron, Gold and everything rarer simply ignore it. The Basic Pickaxe is the tool that takes over from there, and it is the one pickaxe in the game you buy rather than earn: the Mall Rat, standing just inside the Mall Mines in the food court, sells it for 150g. Mining Lv 2 is the gate, and Iron and Gold are what it unlocks.

Everything above that is forged. The Sturdy, Quality and Superior Pickaxes come out of the Workshop and step up through Mining Lv 3, Lv 4 and Lv 5. The Sturdy recipe alone wants 1 Rusty Pickaxe, 1 Basic Pickaxe, 8 Copper Bars and 6 Iron Bars, so the order matters — buy the Basic Pickaxe before you plan any serious mining, or you will be farming the Beginner Mine for ore you could have walked into the Mall and dug up instead.

The Pickaxe Ladder

Five tiers, and every one of them is tied to a mining level as well as a tool. That second half matters more than it looks: mining levels pay out independently of the pickaxe, adding +1% Double Ore Chance per level, which is one extra piece of ore every hundred swings. The ladder is worth climbing even after your tool stops being the bottleneck.

	Pickaxe	Mining level	How to get it
	Rusty Pickaxe	Lv 1	Reward for completing Molly's task "Helping Molly" in Town Outskirts
	Basic Pickaxe	Lv 2	Bought for 150g from the Mall Rat inside the Mall Mines
	Sturdy Pickaxe	Lv 3	Forged in the Workshop — 1 Rusty + 1 Basic + 8 Copper Bar + 6 Iron Bar
	Quality Pickaxe	Lv 4	Forged in the Workshop
	Superior Pickaxe	Lv 5	Forged in the Workshop

The Four Mines

There are four mines, and only two of them sit on the path you walk first. Each one is unlocked by a task rather than by a key or a level, and each has its own ore table. The tables barely overlap, which is why the pickaxe ladder keeps sending you somewhere new instead of letting you farm one tunnel forever.

FIG. 01 — The game labels its own floors: this stairwell reads "F2 Stairwell (R)". The pickaxe, not the floor number, is what decides whether a node will break.

The Beginner Mine is a tutorial wearing a mine costume. It holds Coal, Salt Rock and Copper and nothing else, and it is the one place where the tool you were given is also the tool you need. Treat it as the supply room for your first bars — enough ore for a Copper Bar or two — and leave it the moment the Mall opens.

The Old Woods Mines are where the ore table actually ends. Every bar in the game that is not a Catacombs-only metal can be made from ore in those tunnels, including Platinum, which appears in no other mine. Getting in is the part people stall on: the entrance is gated behind "The Local Jogger's Club", the challenge Michelle and Barry set at the Campsite.

The Catacombs Mines are a different shape of problem entirely. Adam at The Forsaken Settlement holds the only key, and hands it over through the task "The Strange Orb" — you have to break the orb in the darkest part of the Old Woods to lure out what is guarding the gate. Down there the Coal node alone can give you 6 to 14 pieces at once, but it asks for a Quality Pickaxe, so do not plan a Catacombs trip on a Basic.

The Pickaxe Every Ore Needs

This is the table the game never shows you. Depth is not the gate — the tool is. Read the second column before you walk anywhere, because a node you cannot break tells you nothing about whether you are under-levelled or simply holding the wrong pickaxe.

Hard Bones is the one entry on that list you cannot dig at all. It comes off monsters in the Catacombs and goes into the Blast Kiln alongside Coal and Energy to produce a Bone Ingot, which is why a Catacombs run is really two jobs: ore and drops.

Ore to Bar: the Smelting Table

Every bar is an ore plus fuel. The Furnace handles the metals you meet first and the Blast Kiln handles everything from the Catacombs, and the Blast Kiln recipes also charge Energy on top of the Coal. Salt is the odd one out — it needs a Grinder or a Windmill, and only the Grinder burns a Coal for it.

	Ore in	Bar out	Coal	Station
	Copper Ore	Copper Bar	×2	Furnace
	Iron Ore	Iron Bar	×3	Furnace
	Gold Ore	Gold Bar	×5	Furnace
	Raw Void Crystal	Void Crystal Bar	×8	Furnace
	Verdite Ore	Verdite Bar	×12	Furnace
	Platinum Ore	Platinum Bar	×18	Furnace
	Salt Rock	Salt	×1	Grinder (Windmill needs no Coal)
	Hard Bones	Bone Ingot	×6	Blast Kiln + 50 Energy
	Dense Gold Ore	Gold Plate	×6	Blast Kiln + 50 Energy
	Dense Iron Ore	Steel Bar	×12	Blast Kiln + 100 Energy
	Blackiron Ore	Blacksteel Bar	×24	Blast Kiln + 200 Energy
	Crimson Ore	Crimson Bar	Not recorded	Not recorded

Images on this page are from the Welcome to Elderfield Wiki, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Sell the Ore or Smelt It?

Coal is the cost that never appears in the recipe icons, and it turns putting an ore in the furnace from a free upgrade into a real decision. The Forge Shop sells Coal at 20g and buys it back at 10g, so every bar carries a second price tag in the fuel you fed it.

Copper makes the point cleanly. The Forge Shop pays 23g for a Copper Ore, the Garbage Man pays 30g for a Copper Bar, and the two Coal that bar consumed are worth 20g on their own. The ore plus its fuel is worth more than the bar. Smelt Copper because the Sturdy Pickaxe recipe wants 8 Copper Bars, not because you are trying to get rich.

The arithmetic flips as the metals get rarer, which is the reason the deep trips are worth the walk. What changes is not the ratio — it is that Platinum and Verdite cannot be bought at any counter, so the only way to hold the bar is to mine the ore and pay the Coal.

One more rule that applies to everything you pull out of the ground: do not sell the raw material as a reflex. Ore and bars feed the Workshop, and a bar you sold at a profit is a bar you have to mine twice when a recipe asks for it.

Hazards, Gear and Potions

Mining injures you in three separate ways — falling debris, curses and status effects, and enemies that spawn on top of the work — and each one has its own answer.

	Item	What it does	Where to get it
	Hard Hat	Reduces damage from falling debris by 25% when equipped	Box loot at the Old Woods Campsite
	Miner's Potion	+15% mining quantity until midnight	Crafted at the Potion Lab
	Hazard Potion	Encounter 50% fewer enemies while mining, until midnight	Crafted at the Potion Lab
	Small Mine Key	Opens small mine doors. Consumed on use	100g from the Mall Rat or the Forge Shop, or foraged in the Mall Mines

Both potions run on the same clock: they last until midnight rather than for a fixed number of swings. That makes them morning purchases. Drinking a Hazard Potion at 11pm buys you an hour, and the same bottle at 6am buys you most of a day underground.

The Hard Hat answers the debris problem specifically, and debris is the hazard the game warns you about first. It is box loot at the Old Woods Campsite rather than something a shop stocks, so it is easy to walk past on the way to the mines it protects you in.

There is one more piece of mining gear worth chasing: the Ring of Plenty gives +5% chance at 2× mined and foraged resources, and it comes from completing the Purple Room.

How and When Mines Reset

Mines do not reset daily. They refill on a weekly cycle that starts when you bathe, which means a cleared floor stays cleared until you deliberately roll the week over. If you have been waiting for a node to come back while standing next to it, that is why it never did.

The larger mines also rearrange themselves between resets, while the small ones keep the same layout. Learn the Beginner Mine by heart and treat the Old Woods and Catacombs as a fresh walk every week — there is no route to memorise, only a swing pattern.

When to Leave a Mine

The honest answer is: earlier than you want to. Two things decide it for you. Your bag has a hard limit, and the General Store sells the Extra Pouch for 50g to raise it permanently by one slot each — so a full bag is a shopping problem, not a mining one.

The other is the clock. Miner's and Hazard potions both expire at midnight, so the productive window is the day you drank them in. Push past it and you are absorbing debris and enemy encounters at full rate for no extra yield.

And nothing you clear stays cleared past the weekly reset, so there is no reason to linger for a tidy finish. Take the ore you came for and go spend it at the Workshop.

Troubleshooting

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