The Mines
| The Mines | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Type | Location |
| Closed | 1-4 Spring Year 1 |
| Residents | Dwarf |
The Mines are the shaft in the Mountain northeast of Robin's shop, and they open a few days into the first Spring once the landslide across the path is cleared. They run a hundred and twenty floors deep, split into three long stretches of earth, ice and lava, and almost every tool upgrade, weapon and sprinkler a farm will ever need comes out of them. Each floor hides a ladder down, which falls out of a broken rock or a dead monster, so progress is a matter of digging and fighting rather than finding a staircase. Reward chests sit on every tenth floor, and the two that matter most hold a Stardrop near the bottom and the Skull Key at the very end. Clearing the last floor also hardens every monster in the game, so the mines are a line a save crosses once.
Area
The entrance room holds three things: the ladder down to the first floor, an elevator that returns to any floor already reached that ends in a five or a zero, and a minecart for travel to the rest of the valley, which starts working once the Boiler Room bundles are done or Joja has been paid. Marlon is standing by the ladder on the first visit and hands over a Rusty Sword before stepping aside.
The three sections look and behave differently. The first forty floors are brown earth, with copper, quartz, amethyst and topaz in the rocks and geodes among them. The second forty are frozen, where iron, aquamarine, jade and frozen geodes start appearing. The last forty are lava and dark purple, and that is where Gold Ore, rubies, emeralds, Fire Quartz and magma geodes turn up. The final ten floors of each section change their look again, into shadows, then a castle, then a deeper crimson.
The layouts repeat down the shaft. Floor five, forty-five and eighty-five share a map, and so do the matching floors in every other set, which is why veterans know where the dirt patches sit before the screen has loaded. A few floors carry a minecart with coal in it, and those refill at the start of each year.
A blocked passage leads east out of the entrance hall. Breaking it with a steel pickaxe or a bomb opens the Dwarf's home.
Shops
The Dwarf lives behind that rubble, and his shelf is built for the shaft below: all three sizes of bomb, Oil of Garlic to keep weaker monsters away, Life Elixir, Miner's Treat, a safety manual that makes a farmer's own bombs less painful, and a few oddities like the Big Stone Chest recipe and a Rarecrow. He speaks no language the farmer knows at first, and the Dwarvish Translation Guide has to be built out of Dwarf Scrolls dug out of the mines themselves, so the shop is a reward for mining rather than for walking in.
Marlon runs a second service from the Adventurer's Guild up the path. After a blackout from lost health, one lost item or stack can be bought back from him at what it would have sold for, and the offer stands until the next accident replaces it.
Fishing
Two pools break up the descent, and both are worth a rod. Floor twenty holds Ghostfish and Stonefish, and floor sixty holds Ghostfish again alongside the Ice Pip. Ghostfish is the one the Specialty Fish Bundle asks for, and Ghosts in the deeper floors sometimes drop one as well. The other two are collection and cooking fish rather than bundle fish, and the odds of hooking either improve with fishing level and with casting well out from the rock.
Notes
Falling over has a price. Running out of energy or staying past two in the morning costs a slice of the day's gold, while dropping to no health costs more gold and scatters tools and weapons as well. Tools come back in the post the next morning, but a rod or a sword does not, which is what Marlon's recovery service is for. Either way a villager carries the farmer up to the entrance.
Some floors arrive infested, with slimes or a mix of monsters, no rocks and no way down until every monster on the floor is dead, including the Duggies hiding under the dirt. A Staircase skips such a floor outright, and drinking Oil of Garlic before going down stops floors becoming infested at all.
Two other kinds of floor break the pattern. Deep in the lava section a floor occasionally loads as a mushroom floor, thick with red and purple mushrooms, lit by coloured lanterns and almost free of rocks, and it reverts the moment it is left. Once the Quarry Mine has been visited, dungeon floors start appearing anywhere in the shaft, built like the quarry with the quarry's harder monsters, and those are never infested.
The reward floors are the spine of early progress. Leather Boots, a Steel Smallsword, a Slingshot, Tundra Boots, a Crystal Dagger, a Master Slingshot, Firewalker Boots and an Obsidian Edge come out of the chests on the way down, with a Stardrop waiting on floor one hundred and Space Boots below that. Starting a save with remixed mine rewards swaps most of those for something else from a list, so no two files reward the climb identically.
The Skull Key on the last floor is the real prize. It opens the door in the Desert cave that leads into Skull Cavern, and it also lights up the Junimo Kart cabinet in the Stardrop Saloon. Reaching that floor permanently strengthens the monsters everywhere, lets Prismatic Shards and Diamonds drop from anything that dies and brings a fresh set of floor layouts into the mines.
The Shrine of Challenge stands down there too, available once Qi's Walnut Room has been opened and his deep mine errand is finished. Toggling it turns the whole mine dangerous from the next day, with harder versions of every monster, strange forage in place of the usual rubble and Radioactive Nodes in the rocks, which is the only source of Radioactive Ore in the valley.
All Locations
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
