Skip to content

Mining & Caves

Canon

The mining branch of the island ladder is a handful of cave islands across the world tiers — a starter Mines, a Deep Caves, and Crystal Depths at the endgame (names and slicing illustrative until the content pass) — and each one descends: consecutive ore bands of the canon ladder (Copper through Onyxium, the frozen vision ordering) stacked as physical depth inside the island. The portal gate at the island's entry is the only hard check (Mining level, per D-WORLD-SYSTEM-04); everything below it is soft.

Mining islands are peaceful. No hostile creatures spawn on them — the descent is gated by the ore itself: a band's ore needs its Mining tier to break, so depth opens exactly as the skill climbs. A reserved second soft-gate — quest-flag band unlocks — joins when the quest system is designed (quests session; same reservation as D-WORLD-SYSTEM-04's quest gates). Because nothing on a mining island can be killed, the mining branch grants no MobCoins — combat pays those, elsewhere.

The Golem Boss is the one exception to the peace: an optional side arena off the deep layers. It is never a chokepoint — no ore path runs through it. The kill writes the Almanac (bestiary, a title), broadcasts through the records system on rare drops, and pays in materials and cosmetics. When deed gates arrive in the world-system vocabulary, "Golem slain" is a ready gate source — noted, not built.

Ore nodes on shared islands respawn on owner-tuned timers, spread through each band — competition control is respawn pacing and node spread, never permissions.

Home mining exists. Personal-island ore generators run under the same skill soft-gate as the caves: ore above the player's mineable tier does not appear in generator output, and rates sit at an owner-tuned floor — the adventure islands always pay strictly better. (Contrast: mob farms at home are not planned at all — the mining ruling is deliberately more generous because the generator is the skyblock substrate's oldest texture.)

Crystal Depths is placed by this page as the endgame mining island; what its crystals are (Eternal Crystals, the enchanting material) stays owned by the dungeons & enchanting session per D-CURRENCY-01 — this page places the region, not the material.

Decisions

D-MINING-CAVES-01 — few mining islands, internally layered by ore band (ratified 2026-07-16)

The mining branch spans the island tiers as a small set of cave islands, each holding several consecutive ore bands as physical depth. Continuous descent inside each island; ladder legibility across them; rides the ratified world topology unchanged.

Rejected: one island holding all ten bands (the island-tier ladder does nothing for mining; one island carries a whole skill)

; one thin island per ore band (portal hops replace descent — caves stop feeling like caves).

D-MINING-CAVES-02 — mining islands are peaceful; the ore is the gate (ratified 2026-07-16)

Owner ruling: no hostile spawns on mining islands. Depth soft-gates through the ore-tier requirement alone (plus reserved quest flags, wired in the quests session). Uses D-WORLD-SYSTEM-08's tool-tier lever without its creature lever; mining stays a calm, focused loop and the skill itself paces the descent. Consequence accepted: no MobCoin income on the mining branch.

Rejected: creature-danger scaling per depth (V1's cave shape — couples mining pace to combat capability and taxes the off-spec miner); interior hard gates (already rejected corpus-wide, D-WORLD-SYSTEM-08).

D-MINING-CAVES-03 — the canon ore ladder stands; V1's ordering is a remap (ratified 2026-07-16)

Copper → Iron → Steel → Silver → Gold → Cobalt → Mithril → Adamantite → Thorium → Onyxium (frozen vision). V1's cave docs used a different, shorter order (Gold/Silver mid-game, Mithril before Adamantite, no Steel or Onyxium) — remapped onto canon, with Steel and Onyxium receiving bands like every other tier.

Rejected: V1's 4-layer/8-ore ordering (contradicts the frozen vision ladder; re-litigating frozen text is not on the table) .

D-MINING-CAVES-04 — Golem Boss is an optional side arena (ratified 2026-07-16)

Off the deep layers, never on the ore path. Rewards route through existing systems (Almanac deed + title, records broadcast, material and cosmetic drops); a future deed gate may cite the kill once deed gates exist. The arena is the sole place on a mining island where combat happens.

Rejected: boss-gates-deeper-access (V1 as written — requires deed gates at launch, superseding the ratified skill-only vocabulary); a sub-island portal arena via the D-WORLD-SYSTEM-08 escape hatch (more machinery than the fight needs; available later if it ever does).

D-MINING-CAVES-05 — home generators, capped at your mineable tier (ratified 2026-07-16)

Owner ruling: personal-island ore generation runs under the caves' own skill soft-gate — un-mineable ores never appear in output — at floor rates. Home mining keeps the skyblock generator texture without undercutting adventure mining or the D-CURRENCY-05 faucet logic.

Rejected: no home mining at all (the mob-farm parallel — owner chose the more generous line for mining specifically); uncapped home ore up the full ladder (undermines adventure-island pull; breaks floor-rate economics).

D-MINING-CAVES-06 — the V1 corpus fate table (ratified 2026-07-16)

V1 idea Fate
Mining quests / starter cave quests Deferred → quests session (band-unlock flags reserved here)
Underground merchants Adopted via the markets wandering/hidden merchant variants (D-MARKETS-07)
Cave invasions / mining events / crystal storms Deferred → events-world session
Legendary / seasonal / event / boss-exclusive ores Parked — future expansion; any new ore extends the canon ladder by vision amendment
Ore mutations, underground cities, underground factions Parked — no owning system yet
Mining minions Parked — possible htpets overlap; needs its own intent check
Hidden caves / secret ore spawns / hidden ruins Adopted as content flavor inside bands — pairs with skill-tree hidden nodes; content in the owner pass
Area mining tools / legendary tools Deferred → crafting/enchanting canon (tools are gear; hfcrafting tier rules apply)

Rejected: designing parked items now against undesigned systems.

Tuning

  • data/mining.json — which ore bands each mining island holds, node respawn timers, node density per band, home-generator floor rates, Golem arena reward table hooks. Owner-edited; all values illustrative or null until the content pass.
  • Ore-band tier requirements are the Mining tier-unlock curve — already code, pinned by the existing goldens.

Implementation

No owning mod for cave content yet. Ore-tier break requirements ride the hfskills tier-unlock vocabulary (rebuild pending per the skill-trees canon); the Golem kill feeds existing provider hooks (hfalmanac, hfrecords). Home generators are a personal-island (substrate) feature — implementation lands with the island/substrate work, not a progression mod.

Open questions

  • Exact band slicing per island + island count for the mining branch — owner content pass (data/mining.json).
  • Quest-flag band unlocks — quests session (reserved).
  • Golem fight mechanics (telegraphs, phases, group scaling) — combat session territory; V1 sketches (slams, debris, summons) are seeds.
  • Whether Crystal Depths needs its own portal gate above the mining-skill gate (magic/enchanting flavor) — dungeons & enchanting session.
  • Generator visuals/mechanics on personal islands (classic cobble-gen vs bespoke node) — substrate/island session.