Quarry
| Quarry | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Type | Location |
The Quarry is a field of broken rock east of the Mines, reached by a bridge that stays collapsed until the Crafts Room bundles are finished or Joja's Bridge project is paid for. It restocks itself: every day a fresh crop of rocks and ore nodes appears, and over a long save every ore and every gem in the game can turn up there, including the Mystic Stone and the occasional iridium node. Clearing it is the cheapest mining in the valley, because nothing fights back and nothing has to be climbed. It is also the one open area no villager ever walks through, which makes it the safest place on the map to stand a row of furnaces or kegs. A minecart stop opens there as soon as the bridge is mended.
Area
The Quarry shares its map with the Mountain, so it grows the same forage and its artifact spots dig up the same things as the mountainside above the Mines. The cave mouth on the western edge, just north of the bridge, is the entrance to the Quarry Mine.
Most of the ground can be built on. The flat tiles take paths, artisan equipment and refining equipment, and the tillable patches will grow ordinary trees, which means a corner of the Quarry can be turned into a small plantation or a bank of machines without losing a square of farmland. Because no villager crosses the bridge, nothing placed out here is ever walked into or knocked over, a problem that machines left on the farm's paths do suffer from.
The bridge itself is the gate on all of this. Finishing the Crafts Room bundles has the Junimos repair it overnight, with a cutscene that evening, and the Joja route buys the same repair outright. Once it stands, the minecart network adds the Quarry as a fourth stop, which turns a long walk across the mountain into a single ride.
Foraging
Because the Quarry counts as part of the Mountain, the seasonal forage found on the mountainside appears here too, and anything dug out of an Artifact Spot in the Quarry comes from the Mountain's list. The daily spawns throw in oak and maple seeds as well, so a farmer who wants hardwood or syrup can collect tree seeds here rather than shaking trees for them.
Notes
The daily restock follows a fixed budget. In the first year the game tries to place seven new things each morning, and that allowance grows by two every year to a ceiling of sixteen, so a Quarry worked in the fourth year is far richer than the same Quarry in the first. The catch is that existing rocks block new spawns, so leaving a field of plain stone standing quietly throttles the whole area. Stripping it bare is the right habit even when the stone itself is not wanted.
The odds are heavily weighted towards the dull end. Nearly half of what appears is plain rock, and another fifth is rock that may drop coal. Copper and coal nodes are the common useful finds, iron is less frequent and gold is rare. Each individual gem node sits at roughly one chance in four hundred, which is why a Diamond or a Ruby in the Quarry feels like an event. Artifact spots and the occasional Seed Spot fill out the list, and oak and maple saplings sprout at about the same rate as an iron node.
At the very bottom of the table are the two prizes. Mystic Stones are rare, and an iridium node rarer still, far enough down that a farmer may go several seasons without seeing one. That rarity is the reason to keep the ground clear rather than to come looking on any particular day: the Quarry pays out to patience, not to effort.
All Locations
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
