While exploring and shooting zombies in 7 Days To Die can be a blast. What I love to do more than most other things is to go down a dark deep mining shaft and just mine for hours. Mining is quite an important part of my player economy in building up my base and doing a lot of other things.

Skills

Depending on how early into a game I want to do a lot of mining and building up a base. I might go right for Miner 69’er and Mother Lode skills in the strength tab. The great thing is you don’t have to max out the strength attribute either to take both of these skills to level 5.

Mother Lode affects how much you harvest from ore, stone, and other blocks when using everything from a pickax, and shovel to even an auger. Once you max it out at level 5 you get a 100% harvest increase. Which is quite massive.

Miner 69’er on the other hand will increase block damage by up to 150% for all mining tools. Making dinging move quite a lot faster than standard. It is almost unbelievable how much rock and metal you can mine in an hour with this one maxed out.

On top of these skills, there are also books you can either find in the wild on a bookshelf or on traders that are known as The Art Of Mining. Not all of these books will increase usage for every mining tool.

Some are only useful if you are using a mining pickax such as volume 3 that allows you to gain more ore when buzzed off coffee. While others like volume one work for finding gems and silver or gold while mining even if you are using an auger.

These are others that can help you regardless. Such as volume 7 which allows you to craft mining helmets and lanterns. Since it can be quite hard to see down in caves this is quite a nice one to have unless you loot a decent mining helm or mining light mod.

Auger

For my tier 6 auger, I can have up to 4 mods. If you don’t have a maxed-out tool you will have a lot less mod space such as only one. If that is the case chances are you will be breaking a lot of rocks in the early days so if you happened to find Bunker Buster Mod for 15% damage against the stone that can help you out a way.

For the next slots, I would usually go with the following. Iron Breaker Mod for 15% damage for iron. Then I would choose Grave Digger Mod for 15% for dirt. Since you can swap these out it can come in handy to do so depending on the type of medium you are drilling through with an auger.

The last slot is more to my taste. I prefer the Large Tank Mod to hold twice as much gas so I’m having to stop and refill half as much. Many prefer Structural Brace Mod for 25% reduced damage to the tool to save on the number of repair kits they end up using over the long run. Another decent choice to have.

Above-Ground Mining

One type of mining material I often more abundant in mining above ground than underground is oil shale. It has this multi-color hue. It’s quite easy to tell from other types of things you can mine.

While you can mine a little above-ground rock and sometimes a bit around under it. A lot of the time that is where it ends not going that deep into the ground. On rarer occasions, you can luck out and find a massive vein of the ore you found above ground.

In this instance, since I mine in the desert where you can find oil shale. I ended up pulling out over 12k units of the stuff. It still looked like I had a lot left so I even placed a marker on my map to come back to it if I need more.

Oil Shale is quite important if you use an augur to mine and you find it in the desert. As you can use a chemistry station to convert it into gas. You can also make it into another hard to acquire a lot of material oil.

The single massive find I had will sustainable my mining and base gas needs for quite some time. It looks like I won’t be scraping by checking out gas stations, cars, and deconstructing cars to get further gas for a while.

Early Underground Mining

This also tends to be where you are quite limited on supplies and time. You don’t have the time to gather lots of wood to make wooden ladders or better. Just whatever kind of mine shaft you can create tends to work.

I prefer to go down to bedrock as I tend to have a greater chance of finding massive iron veins. This is not without its drawbacks. As you tend to be at the bottom of the iron veins you find so I try and mine a ramp-up and get above them to get as much as I can out of an area.

I also tend to keep things quite private down in this kind of mine. Anything I end up mining I’ll haul back up to my main bases crafting and smelting room. Forges and other things are quite an experience early on even more so if you need crucibles.

More Advanced Mine

There comes a point where you just get tired of all the walking down a long ramp to get to bedrock. So I tend to drill a vertical shaft and put ladders in place. By the time that occurs, I have more than enough resources that I’m fine investing in ladders. Along with having the time to dig yet another giant pit.

You also have quite a few points into mining traits and a decent modded auger. So running up to a crafting room far above you to fill a couple of forges with iron or stone is no longer cutting things.

This is where I end up drilling out a decent-sized area so I can place down over a dozen and more if I need forges. I also have a couple of storage boxes down there for finished products or extra mining materials to offload to free up more space in my inventory.

The great thing is the zombies can go and huff and puff and leave you the heck alone this deep underground. Running this many forges and even more later on once I start to craft and expand above ground would get me quite a lot of unwanted attention. Down here zero cares in the world.

Since I’m now working off a ladder system to get back up and have a decent footprint down at bedrock. I’ll mind out in one direction than another and another. Since I don’t have to worry about losing the entry to get out via a ramp it’s easy to spot my exit in this kind of setup.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about 7 Days To Die.