Digging and walls

Walls are not forever. With a pick-axe and a lot of patience you can dig through stone, and a big enough explosion blows walls apart. A wall that gives way becomes rubble: open ground you can walk on, a little slowly, and see across.

Digging

1. Learn to mine. Only someone trained in the Mining skill can dig. Every dwarf, duergar, and kobold knows it, and some craftspeople and commoners do. Anyone else can learn it from Alberich in Fyrdelf, for gold.
2. Get a digging tool. A pick-axe or a mattock goes in the Tool slot of your equipment: press i, then m (Tool), then the tool’s letter. Ælfric’s General Store in Cēaptūn sells a pick-axe.
3. Dig. Press u (use a tool), then a direction: “Dig in which direction?”. You start digging into the wall next to you (“You dig into the stone wall.”).
4. Keep at it. Digging goes on by itself, turn after turn, as resting does, until the wall gives way: “After 6 minutes, the stone wall crumbles.”

Each turn of digging is a normal action, 6 seconds at a normal pace, and it takes many turns. The harder the wall, the longer it takes. A better tool and more Strength get you through faster. A heavy load slows digging, as it slows everything you do (Burden). The Tunneler talent does half again as much work a turn (see Talents). Magic that digs faster, on a pick-axe, gloves, or body armour, adds its percent of work a turn on top (see Magic items). So does the Mining skill: 25 % more at 100, 40 % more at 200. Every wall you dig through trains it. Trained in Mining, a wall you dig through in a dungeon may give you ore, stone, or a gem (see Mining).

A pick-axe can itself be magic. Magic ones turn up rarely in the loot of the deeper places (from item level 3) and in shops. Its description gives its digging power: “Digs at 10”. A mattock digs at 15. The pick-axes you start with, find lying in a level, or take from a dwarf are plain.

Digging times at average Strength (10) and a normal pace:

And with a pick-axe at other Strength scores:

With a pick-axe, at a normal pace.

Without a tool ready, u tells you so: “You have no digging tool ready.” Untrained in Mining, it says “You do not know how to mine: that takes the Mining skill.” Pointing it at open ground says “There is nothing to dig there.”

Stopping and going on

Digging stops early, as resting does, when a hostile creature comes within 5 steps in view (“A kobold comes into view; you stop digging after 3 minutes.”) or something worth a message happens, such as a sound you hear, an attack on you, or the rain starting.

What you dug stays dug. The wall keeps the work you put into it, and the next u toward it goes on from there (“You go on digging at the stone wall.”). Look mode calls a wall you have started on “partly dug”. A dig also stops after a day of work, if it ever runs that long.

Noise

Digging is loud. Iron on stone carries a long way (see Hearing). Creatures nearby hear it and some come to look, and when it is out of sight you hear it as “digging”. Only you dig; creatures do not.

What breaks and what does not

• Packed earth gives way quickly, stone walls take a while, and granite takes longest. The table above gives each one’s time.
• Doors, trees, crystals, torches, and the like never break: “You cannot dig through the closed door.”
• The edge of a level never breaks, whatever it is made of. Every level is closed in by walls you cannot dig out of.
• Solid rock deep in the ground shows as a stone wall once you dig next to it, so a tunnel you dig is walled like any corridor.

Only walls break. You cannot dig down or up, and you cannot dig on the overworld.

Explosions

A fireball trap’s explosion (see Traps) breaks, at once, every wall in its blast that is softer than the explosion is strong: “The walls collapse!” The table above says which walls a fireball breaks. It reaches only the walls it can touch, the cells in line of sight of its centre and within its reach, so a blast never carries on through a wall it breaks. Nothing is left to chance. Granite and the edge of the level hold.

After a wall falls

The wall becomes rubble, and the rest follows at once. Light from beyond the gap spills through, you see into what was behind it, and you remember it as you remember everything you have seen (Sight and memory). Dust rises where it fell.

Where to dig

Fyrdelf, the fire diggings under the hills of Ascdūn (The Ascmearc), is a mine and the place to try digging. Its foreman’s cabin keeps a spare pick-axe behind a plank wall.

See also: Terrain, Mining, and Searching.