How To Mine In Rimworld

Mining is one of the fundamental resource-gathering mechanics in Rimworld. Whether you’re looking to extract valuable materials like jade or simply clearing rock from your base, understanding the mining system is essential for colony management. This guide will walk you through the entire process, from designating mining areas to managing your colonists’ work priorities.

Getting Started: Selecting Rocks to Mine

The first step in mining is choosing which rocks you want to extract. Start by clicking on the rock or stone block you wish to mine. If you want to select multiple adjacent blocks, hold Shift and click on each additional block to highlight them all.

Once you’ve selected your target rocks, you’ll notice at the bottom of the screen it displays “mine with L”. This tells you that you can either press the L key on your keyboard or click the designated mining button to proceed.

Designating Areas for Mining

Press L on your keyboard to designate your selected rocks for mining. After doing this, the selected blocks will be highlighted with a gray overlay, indicating they have been designated for mining operations.

Understanding Work Priorities

Now that you’ve designated the mining area, you need to ensure your colonists will actually perform the work. Open the Work panel at the bottom of the screen to bring up the work schedule. You’ll see various work types listed, including a mining column.

Each colonist has a priority number assigned to different work tasks. For mining, you can click on the mining column header to sort colonists by their mining priority from high to low. A priority of 2 means the colonist will treat mining as very important. However, if another task has a priority of 1, they will complete that task first before mining.

Prioritizing Specific Mining Tasks

If you need a colonist to mine something immediately, you can force them to prioritize it. Right-click on a designated rock block and select “Prioritize Mining this [material name]” (for example, “Prioritize Mining this Slate”). Your colonist will immediately drop what they’re doing and come mine that specific block.

You don’t always need to manually prioritize tasks though. Colonists with mining assignments will naturally work on designated areas without intervention, making the system flexible for different playstyles.

Mining Veins: The Efficient Approach

When you encounter valuable ore deposits like jade, you have the option to mine individual blocks or mine the entire vein at once. Instead of just selecting one rock, use the “Mine the Vein” option.

The “Mine the Vein” command designates a contiguous area of rock to be mined out. Your colonists will continue mining automatically until all connected rocks of the same type have been extracted. This is incredibly convenient because you won’t need to repeatedly check back to designate remaining portions of the vein.

Summary

Mining in Rimworld is straightforward: select your target rocks, press L to designate them, set appropriate work priorities for your colonists, and let them handle the rest. For larger ore deposits, use the “Mine the Vein” option to ensure complete extraction without micromanagement. With these techniques, you’ll efficiently gather all the resources your colony needs to thrive.

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