Crafting reference
Mining and colored smithing
Every vein was a roll of the dice, from the Iron that kept Britain’s forges running to the Black Rock miners could chase all night.
- Metals
- 15
- Rarest
- Mytheryl and Black Rock
- Distribution
- Random veins
The fifteen-metal ladder
There was no public Black Rock mountain and no safe route through the colors. Novus chose the metal when a vein was created, so a familiar cave could give one miner an ordinary Iron load and the next miner something worth calling friends over.
Iron filled half the veins and paid out in weight. Beyond it, every step asked for more skill, appeared less often, and usually gave less ore. By the time a miner reached Mytheryl or Black Rock, the find itself was the reward.
| Metal | Mining | Chance | Ore | What the find meant |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Iron | 0.0 | 50.0% | 9–30 | The workhorse metal—new miners found it everywhere and hauled the largest loads |
| Rusty | 50.0 | 6.0% | 8–21 | The first colored strike, common enough to feel within reach once Mining hit 50 |
| Old Copper | 60.0 | 6.0% | 7–18 | Another early colored step, sharing Rusty’s six-in-a-hundred chance |
| Dull Copper | 65.0 | 6.0% | 5–25 | Still an early find, but a vein could be nearly empty or richer than most Iron loads |
| Shadow | 70.0 | 5.0% | 5–16 | Where the ladder began to tighten—fewer veins and smaller hauls |
| Copper | 75.0 | 5.0% | 5–20 | The middle of the climb, with the better possible haul of the five-percent pair |
| Bronze | 80.0 | 4.5% | 4–12 | The last broadly attainable metal before the high-end colors thinned out |
| Golden | 85.0 | 3.0% | 3–10 | A seasoned miner’s strike—only three veins in a hundred |
| Rose | 87.0 | 3.5% | 3–9 | A late-game find, just a little less elusive than Golden and Agapite |
| Agapite | 90.0 | 3.0% | 3–8 | The ninety-skill threshold, with small veins and no promise of finding one |
| Blood Rock | 93.0 | 2.5% | 3–6 | The name miners watched for once the odds fell below three percent |
| Verite | 95.0 | 2.0% | 2–6 | A two-percent strike with only a handful of ore behind it |
| Valorite | 99.0 | 1.5% | 2–4 | A near-master find—rare enough that every vein mattered |
| Mytheryl | 99.5 | 1.0% | 2–3 | One of the two one-percent veins, and never more than three ore |
| Black Rock | 100.0 | 1.0% | 1–3 | The summit: Grandmaster Mining, one vein in a hundred, and sometimes a single ore |
Back at the forge
A rare vein was only half the story. The Dec. 1999 overlay gave smiths colored plate menus and placed Smithing Ingot tokens in Britain, turning a miner’s lucky strike into armor people could recognise on sight.
The same surviving scripts preserve a harder lesson. War Axe and Hammer Pick recipes disappeared after an exploit, and the official news warned that abuse would cost jail time and bank gold. Redux keeps the metal ladder and the fix—not the broken recipes.
Not everything came from a mountain
Balron Bone sat beside the colored metals in players’ memories, but it belonged to a different hunt. The custom catalog defines the resource and five matching armor pieces—arms, chest, gloves, helmet, and leggings. It came from creatures, not veins, and never counted as a sixteenth ore.