⛏️ Mining & Foraging
Not everything worth gathering grows in a bed. Beneath Fairhaven runs a mine twenty floors deep, and across its hills and woods the island scatters wild plants, mushrooms, and curiosities free for the picking. This page presses both pursuits — the pickaxe and the basket.
The Mine
The lay of the deep
The mine descends floor by floor, each stratum with its own treasures. Progress is gated — deeper floors open as you find keys and advance the story — and the very bottom, level 20, even hides a fishing pool (Fishing).
| Depth | What the rock holds |
|---|---|
| Below floor 5 | Iron ore begins. |
| Floors 5–14 | Copper ore (richest around floors 7–9). |
| Floors 10–14 | Silver ore joins in. |
| Floors 15–20 | Gold ore, plus the finest pickings. |
| Floors 16–20 | Mine keys, shiitake mushrooms, and gems — sapphires, rubies, emeralds, and diamonds. |
For the complete survey — every floor’s ores, gems, chests, and the gem finders — see The Mine: Floor by Floor.
How the way down opens: on most floors, breaking ore nodes eventually turns up the key to the next level. The exceptions are floors 14 and 20 — floor 14’s way onward needs the special Deep Mine key, earned through the coven’s questline. Floor 15 keeps itself locked until you’ve earned that way down; the key to floor 16 then hides nearby.
Natalia and your tools
Natalia Kuznetsova, the island’s blacksmith, is the other half of every mining trip. Bring her ore and she smelts it into ingots; bring her ingots and coin and she upgrades your tools through the metals — copper, then onward to iron, silver, and gold.
- Prioritize the copper pickaxe as soon as you’ve hauled up enough copper — every subsequent trip gets easier.
- Upgrades reduce the energy cost per swing, which is the real currency of a mining day.
- The gold pickaxe cracks gem rocks in a single hit instead of two — the diamond-hunter’s best friend.
Natalia’s forge also produces crafted metalwork for story projects (she’ll turn your copper into a soup kettle, among other things). Get to know her — every tool upgrade and most quest metalwork goes through her forge (Character Directory).
take every ore run straight to Natalia — ore smelts into ingots there, and the copper pickaxe is the first upgrade to buy 🔨
What it’s all for
Ores and ingots feed tool upgrades, crafting stations (Crafting Stations), and quest projects; gems sell handsomely and make impressive gifts (Gift Preferences).
Foraging
The island provides
Walk anywhere with your eyes down and Fairhaven offers up wild plants, flowers, berries, and mushrooms — the woods and mountain paths are especially generous, and even the mine grows shiitake in its depths. Forageables respawn over time, so a regular circuit of the island keeps the basket full at the price of a pleasant walk.
Uses in craft and cauldron
| Destination | Why foragers matter |
|---|---|
| The cauldron | Wild plants and mushrooms are the backbone of potion-making — many brews call for ingredients no garden bed grows (Potions). |
| The kitchen | Mushrooms and wild produce round out plenty of recipes (Cooking). |
| Gifts & quests | Villagers request forageables surprisingly often; a stocked chest saves a scavenger hunt. |
| Coin | Forage costs nothing to gather, so even modest sales are pure profit (Money-Making). |
A forager’s habits
- Pick everything you pass — it costs seconds and it all stores.
- Learn the rich routes: woods, mountain, shoreline (Island Map) — the Interactive Island Map marks every patch, with what grows there each season.
- Keep a reserve of common wild plants and mushrooms for the cauldron before you need them mid-quest.
- Wild flowers are for picking freely — it’s the flowers you planted near beehives that must stay in the ground (Beekeeping & Orchards).
Specimens from Under and Over the Ground
From the mine’s dark shelves — ores, gems, and oddities:
And from the open air, the forager’s basket:
sign-off tip: descend the mine with a nearly empty bag and climb out with a full one — hauling half a warehouse down twenty floors helps no one 💎
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