Rocks
Ore is obtained from rocks, the same as it works currently.

These rocks will be placed around the world in locations which become more inaccessible at higher tiers, although all ore will be obtainable without quest prerequisites. (It is possible that quests might unlock more accessible locations.)

Rocks will not be hard to find, and will not deplete. This means that you never compete with other players for ore. The quantity of ore a player can obtain, and the amount entering the economy as a result, will be controlled by the mechanics themselves.

Mining
When the player clicks on a rock, the character begins striking it with a mining pick. If the player is carrying multiple mining picks, they are chosen in this order:

Held in hand
Highest tier pick in inventory
Pick in toolbelt

If the player chooses to ignore the more involved mechanics, then they will automatically accumulate mining XP and ore. XP will be gained on every strike, whereas ore is only obtained every so often. In this regard the skill will feel very similar to pre-rework, but with more frequent (but proportionally smaller) XP drops.

XP per hour will remain roughly the same as pre-rework, but the new rates will be slightly faster (say 10% or so faster) at a given level in order to err on the side of not nerfing the skill.

Difficulty & Progress
The player strikes with their mining pick automatically once every 4 ticks. Every strike, they accumulate progress points. Progress points are a bit like "damage" dealt to the rock. The amount of progress points earned per swing depends on the player's mining level and the type of pick they are using. Better picks get more progress per strike. Each point of mining skill also adds 1 progress per strike.

All rocks have a difficulty, which is the amount of progress needed to get ore from the rock. Once the player has built up progress points equal to the difficulty of the rock, they get a piece of ore from that rock, and the progress is reset to 0. (Any excess progress is lost, although full XP is gained for that strike.) The rock is not destroyed or depleted.

The XP a player earns on each strike is equal to the amount of progress earned, multiplied by a bonus for the rock type which increases with tier. This means that more progress = more XP, and mining higher tier rocks will give much better xp than lower tier rocks.

Progress is stored even if you stop mining. If you resume again later, you’ll carry on where you left off. You don’t need to mine the exact same rock, just any rock of that type. If you mine a different rock type, your progress will reset to 0.

Breaks & Recovery
Every so often while mining, the player character will tire and need to take a break to recover. The frequency of breaks depends on the player’s mining level. The player’s mining level divided by ten is (approximately) the number of strikes that can be made before a break is needed.

When a break is taken, the player pauses for 20 ticks, wiping their brow and having a breather. At the end of this 20 tick period, the player automatically resumes mining with no input required.

The player can automatically interrupt the break by simply clicking on the rock to resume mining. There is no penalty for doing this, and no minimum delay, so clicking promptly results in no loss of efficiency. This rewards attentive gameplay without harshly penalising players who are largely AFK. Mining the highest tier of ore at 90+, the penalty for not clicking at all will be about 30% less efficiency for both XP and ore.

Hardness
In return for giving a better XP multiplier (and higher tier ore), higher tier rocks also have a property called hardness. This is a flat reduction in the amount of progress you get when you strike that rock. For example, if your pick would normally strike for 11 progress and the rock has a hardness of 10, you actually only get 1 progress.

You can counter hardness by using a better quality pickaxe. Picks have a penetration value which is the same as the hardness at that tier. For example, drakkurlith rocks have a hardness of 60 and a drakkurlith or dragon pickaxe has a penetration of 60. The penetration of the pick you’re using is subtracted from the rock’s hardness before the hardness is subtracted from progress. If the net hardness is less than zero, progress is not penalised at all (no progress is added either).

This means that as long as you’re using a pickaxe which is at least as high a tier as the rocks you’re mining, you can ignore hardness and make full progress. This mechanic only affects players who are trying to mine high level ore without using the right pickaxe.

The hardness mechanic exists to make sure that higher tiers of ore are difficult to mine with low tier pickaxes. Without it, high tier rocks would need to have difficulties which were hundreds or thousands of times higher, with a corresponding progress from high tier pickaxes. This would make high tier pickaxes much too effective at mining low tier ore, and also reduce the impact of the mining skill on mining rates at high level to be nearly irrelevant compared with the pickaxe.

Imcando Pyxides (Deposit Points)
The Imcando dwarves were sophisticated spellcasters as well as skilled miners and smiths, and used magical mining “carts” called pyxides to quickly transport ore between locations. In recent years, enterprising humans have set up a network of these pyxides around the world to make mining much more efficient and profitable.

Each mining spot has one or more pyxides, which are cylindical crates located somewhere within easy reach of the mining rocks. The pyxis stores a certain amount of ore, after which it must be teleported away to be emptied. The amount of ore stored depends on the ore type, but corresponds to about 20-30 minutes of mining depending on the level of activity.

Once the pyxis is full, no more ore can be dumped into it. At this point the player can click on it to teleport themselves to the nearest bank, along with all the ore in the pyxis which is then automatically and immediately deposited into the bank for them. The pyxis is now empty, but the player will have to return to the mining point using their own methods.

(Although conceptually the pyxis is teleporting to the bank with the ore, the pyxis object itself doesn’t actually move, only the player.)

The aims of this mechanic are:
To make banking ore less difficult to remove the need for drop mining.
To create natural break points in the skill so you can’t mine indefinitely without interruption.
To establish a formal network of mining spots which could be tied into future teleport rewards.

Strength & Agility
Strength and agility will both have a small effect on mining.

One tenth of the strength skill (rounded  up) will be added to the progress with every pickaxe strike. The contribution of strength to mining effectiveness will be about 5% of overall mining performance.

One tenth of the agility skill (rounded up) will be subtracted from the number of cycles the character pauses for when recovering when mining AFK. This has no effect on performance when mining actively, but potentially as high as a 15% improvement on rates when AFK.

Both of these cases are highly dependent on balancing and feedback, and may well be removed if they turn out to be problematic. We would like to add additional value to these skills which are currently underused, but at the same time we never want high strength to be a prerequisite for effective skilling.