Automated Mining operation.

[SangoProduction]

So....big problem. A plague wiped out the dwarves. Other races are not nearly as enthusiastic about mining for shiny rocks and such. So what does the world turn to? Having a wizard do it.

So, I need a system of at least nearly mindless creatures/automatons which will mind ceaselessly, and can differentiate between ores, gems and rocks. It needs to have as little need for watching over as possible.

For the purpose of this, just conjuring the materials doesn't work for one reason or another. Otherwise, all non-epic magic is free-play.

Is there a good way to do this?

[Karl Aegis]

Tin Golems would work, except they have 5 Int. They can put skill points into Profession and Craft skills and get a bonus.

[Telonius]

Get a bunch of Earth Elementals and use Dominate Monster to get it to find ore and drag it back to the surface. Should be relatively simple; Earth Glide gets blocked by metal, so basically have them roam around until they run into something. Requires a fairly high-level Wizard, and 1 round/day to concentrate on maintaining the spell. Each elemental is dominated for 1 day/level (more if you can use some metamagic reducers to Extend it).

Possible complication: Drow upset that the elemental tried to take back part of their fortress.

[Jowgen]

Low-end solution: lots of Unseen Crafters.

High-end solution: Runic Guardians (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?504415-Terraforming-planetoids-in-a-self-sufficient-fashion/page3) with a suitable spell selection and the ability to make more of themselves. Slight risk of apocalypse (https://youtu.be/Oq8EoWZk5Tw?t=42).

[Goaty14]

Nothing convincing a bunch of modrons won't fix. Formians could also work, but they have a whole "needs food or will die" clause.

[Vizzerdrix]

Minor servator is the spell you want.

[Coidzor]

This sounds like a premise that leads to Clockwork Horrors.

[Fouredged Sword]

Lyre of building? I like unssen crafters as an option. Start stacking up high cl eternal wands of it and any CL 1 arcane caster can oversee them.

There are some good burrowing monsters. Handle animal takes the work out of mining a good bit for pretty cheap.

[Nifft]

This sounds like a premise that leads to Clockwork Horrors.

Clockwork HELPERS™.

[SangoProduction]

Minor servator is the spell you want.

Oh. Yeah. That's probably exactly what is optimal. A fully intelligent, essentially willing construct that perpetually does what you want.

[Blue Wizard]

Any time the subject of mining in D&D comes up I think of this post:


The problem with those DMG2 rules is they are too much of an abstraction. They assume you are doing what everyone else is doing. Say for a mine, you grab a bunch of peasants, hand them picks and point them at a hill.

Well, guys swinging picks go painfully slow through any kind of solid rock. So you have to break the stone up some to make the job easier. Today we use explosives. Historically they built huge bonfires next to the surface they wanted to crack, heating it up so it would fracture. Explosives do it better, but both resulted in lots of cracked and broken up rocks.

Unfortunately, neither method works just on the surface you wanted to dig. They also broke up the rocks of your walls and ceilings, too. And that meant you had a big danger of cave-ins crushing your miners. So you had to employ more men just to haul in timbers to shore up those roofs. And blacksmiths to sharpen those picks and other tools, because pounding iron on solid rock blunts the iron pretty fast. Tools like drills and picks had to be sharpened a couple of times per day. And all of this is for nothing if you don't haul that broken up rock out, and that means mine carts and people whose job it is to just haul broken up stone out. Then it all has to be crushed into even smaller bits so it can be smelted (assuming you are after metals). Guys with sledgehammers often had that job, and it was backbreaking work (so bad they often had prisoners in jails doing it).

All of that is an awful lot of support for some guys swinging picks, but every bit of it is essential. Your skill checks just account for better accounting, skillful managing so there are fewer wasteful accidents, and insightful decision making, but still you're using the same essential engine for running a mine that everyone does: guys swinging picks.

Or is it really all so essential?

Say you've got yourself a level one warlock, follower or employee doesn't really matter. He's got himself the Least Invocation Baleful Utterance, which produces a Shatter spell at will, which does in a single round about as much breaking up of stone as a strong man can do on a good day, plus as a Warlock he can keep this up every round always and forever.

He only hits the rock he intends to break up, so there's less concern over a fractured rock ceiling falling in on his head as it never got fractured in the first place. So you employ less men shoring that up.

No fires or explosives are needed. No blacksmiths to sharpen tools that aren't being used. Spend 500gp on a Talisman of the Disk and you've got Tenser's Floating Disk all day, every day, which is surely the most pain-free mine cart that ever existed. You don't need to lay track for it, and it never breaks down, moves at a full walking pace without mules having to haul the weight. If your warlock had a familiar it could wear the necklace and haul stone out while he shatters more. And what's more it's all broken up nice and fine into very small gravel, already perfect for smelting.

Suddenly an entire mine operation that once took hundreds of people is doing the same work with only one person.

Are there rules to reflect this? No. But as a DM you really should allow this to have an obscene profit margin. You could even work it out mathematically. Say one warlock replaces a hundred mine workers, and each of those mine workers, skilled blacksmiths and all, only earned one silver piece a day by D&D rules. That's 100 silver, or 10gp per day for mine operation just on payroll alone. Give it all to your warlock as salary so he'll be happy.

Then, to account for those timbers you don't have to buy for roof shoring that is no longer necessary, the fuel for the blacksmiths' forges, track for the mine carts, mules and fodder for them, and all of those other supplies you don't have to pay for, give yourself the same back again: 10gp profit per day sounds perfectly reasonable, don't you think?

In fifty days you'll have paid off your Talisman of the Disk. After that every cent is profit.

EDIT: And actually, it ought to do better than that, as each Shatter spell he casts represents one miner's work for one day, to say nothing of all of that support staff. So in two hours your warlock will have replaced 120 miners, and who knows how many people overall. A standard eight hour work day for your warlock replaces over a thousand miners with picks and shovels.

[Vizzerdrix]

Oh. Yeah. That's probably exactly what is optimal. A fully intelligent, essentially willing construct that perpetually does what you want.

For best results, apply to shapesand. They will be able to adapt to whatever piece of equipment is needed. Picks, struts, ladders, minecarts, etc.

[SangoProduction]

For best results, apply to shapesand. They will be able to adapt to whatever piece of equipment is needed. Picks, struts, ladders, minecarts, etc.

Hrm. lol. Yeah. The 3.0 spell doesn't seem to be incredibly picky about its materials. Or shape...or lack thereof.

[unseenmage]

Intelligent magic items can activate their own superpowers.

Make one with Fabricate and Animate Objects several times per day and turn it loose to mine.

Fabricate makes the mine wall any shape at all and Animate Objects makes it walk wherever.

Work in Greater Teleport and now the materials arrive instantly. Work in Greater Plane Shift and viola
extraplanar mining.
Work in arcane Genesis and now you're creating raw materials from scratch in a demiplane specifically designed for that purpose.


Minor Servitor gets you dispellable sentient friendly animated-object-like Constructs instead and Awaken Sand works to turn the detritus of the endeavor into sentient friendly ooze-like Constructs.



A tireless minion with an at will Su or Sp ability carrying around a Portable Hole/Enveloping Pit with either a few custom resetting magic traps, Spell Clocks, or Energy Transformstion Field can also net you infinitrly recurring spells.

[unseenmage]

Hrm. lol. Yeah. The 3.0 spell doesn't seem to be incredibly picky about its materials. Or shape...or lack thereof.

Awaken Sand is a 3.5 spell from Sandstorm. Though the 3.0 Minor Servitor spell also works.

Also, OMG somebody ninja'ed me on Awaken Sand!!! I'm so proud.

Edit: The rules for mining are in the Kobold section of Races of the Dragon.

[Bohandas]

The Automatons from pagr 27 of Monster Manual 2 are explicitly mining robots

[Segev]

Shapesand tools would have the benefit of not needing resharpening, too: just will them back into shape.

Don't forget the utility of divination or even contact other plane (I suggest the elemental plane of Earth) to help discern where to build your mine. Using rust monsters or bound xorn to sniff out metals may help, too.

[The Random NPC]

Any time the subject of mining in D&D comes up I think of this post:

The only problem I have with this quote is that it assumes everyone earns 1 silver a day. That's the cost of an untrained hireling, a trained hireling gets 3 silver a day at minimum. Even still, once you start getting into permanent operations like mining, you should probably be using Profession to figure out wages. Which just goes to show that spellcasters would save even more money than using manual labor.

[unseenmage]

There's also Orevine, a plant that bears metal fruit if its roots are close enough to ore. It's in Dragon, dont remember which one. There's a plant's link in my signature with the info.

There are even several versions for different ores.

[LordBlade]

Personally, I'd fill my mine with skeletons. :p