Mining seems wrong.

[smart86]

So I am only getting 32 ore with regular shovels. Pretty sure I should get 50 or 51 ore per shovel regardless of failures to dig up ore.

[LKP]

Yes, I remember shovels lasting for 51 successful extractions of ore. I don't know if exceptional quality ones would last longer. They did post-ren, when you could see how many uses a tool had left.

[smart86]

I know exceptional has at least 80 uses before breaking but I don't think its coded right now to only degrade each time you get an ore(no matter the size).

[rouss]

On OSI they broke after 51 ores, I even remember reading that on stratics.

Also, this message from newsgroups ('99): https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rec.gam ... l9eAyx_twJ

It's 51 ore. I always get 102 ingots from each shovel and it's cheaper to
buy them from the tinker at 14gp than use 4 ingots (which sell at 6) to make
one.

Cabbot, Great Lakes
GM Smith + GM Miner

Never mined on UOSA; do ores combine here? Like, you could combine large, 12 stone piles with small ones. Just checking.

[LKP]

Yes, you can combine ores of different sizes.

[Blaise]

I'm not positive in my recollections of mining, but I'm fairly certain it was uses, not successful uses.
Also, I GM'ed mining here with pickaxes and consistently got 50 uses before they broke (all purchased from NPCs).
I didn't learn until after that shovels are lighter and have the same amount of uses. However, I'm still of the opinion that mining without a pickaxe in my hand looks silly.

[Nathaniel]

Shovels are cheaper too.
Just equip one pickaxe and put shovels in bag, then it doesn't look silly. That's what I did anyway.

A brand new shovel will yield 51 pieces of Ore before it breaks.

From this shard's wiki

Edit: My recollection was also extractions, not that recollections are worth much if anything. The first skill I ever GMed was mining.

[Kaivan]

According to the demo code, the durability on an item is only lost when ore is successfully mined. Unfortunately, the exact durability of a shovel is not immediately apparent in the demo scripts, and likely requires the skills of Batlin to determine that information. However, the newsgroups do provide strong confirmation that both shovels and pickaxes both acquired 51 pieces of ore, and were then destroyed.

[Bahamut]

I referenced this site in another post I made about Tailoring inaccuracies, but it also contained info on mining:

So far I have only been able to test 5 shovels and 5 pickaxes (I work full-time and haven't got a lot of time to play the game). All shovels and pickaxes were bought from a tool shop, and should therefore not be dependent on any tinker's skill. I know that my results can be deemed not statistically significant, but I have found a trend in my results, and I believe that this trend will continue. Here's a table showing the number of attempts I got from each tool:

Tool Number of attempts
Pickaxe 54 58 57 60 58
Shovel 56 54 53 53 53

As you can see the number of attempts for each tool lies in the range of 50-60. I think this trend will continue for the other tests I will do, and in the end I will find that the amount of attempts are equal for shovels and pickaxes.

-Bahamut