Hard Mining consisted of excavating rock or another physical substance to extract resources, mainly ores. It was practiced by a wide swathed of sentient and other races, but was generally only used when stride mining was impractical.

Technicalities

In many locations across the world, creatures wanted to excavate certain resources from the soil and couldn't do this through easier methods, such as collecting them on the surface or stride mining across cave networks such as the Caverealm. In these cases, they fell back to the conceptually simple displacement of uninteresting carrier volume to access the ore.

Hard mining was often necessary to excavate certain ores of high values or of greater rarity which weren't accessible through other means. Additionally, closed volume often contained many more resources than otherwise openly accessible areas, both because others might have taken those resources from those places before, or because some ores - notably mithral - only formed in solid stone that didn't form open tunnels.

The most obvious limitation of this technique was that all the surrounding volume had to be removed first. Accordingly, hard mining required much more expansive infrastructure, including ways to excavate the carrier volume, ways to transport it out of the way, methods to secure and stabilized opened areas from collapse or landslides, and ways to extract and transport out the ore.

Forms of Hard Mining

There were different approaches to hard mining, due to the advanced infrastructure, technology, and funds necessary for it.

Tunnel Mines

The traditional dwarven method was to directly dig tunnels through the volume to access the ores. These could range from being man-height to being large machine-driven corridors. They could be excavated by humanoid power with pickaxes, with harnessed natural tunnelers, or with larger machines and magic. This method produced expansive networks of tunnels going through substrate-rich carrier volume, usually stone. It required much shoring due to the great pressure of the rock above and featured many environmental dangers, such as gallery crashes, breathing airborne microparticles, fire, and explosions of natural gas.

Crater Mines

A second "sentient" method to access ores located near the surface, usually in loose carrier volume such as earth, gravel or sand, was to create crater mines. This method required less skill or knowledge and was generally cheaper. It could only supply ores of lesser quality, and often less pure, than underground tunnel mines could.

Natural Tunneling

There were multiple creatures that could dig through rock well. These included bullettes (land sharks), oythugs, and purple worms. These "natural tunnelers" could dig through loose surface soils and sometimes rock, accessing minerals that interested them, usually for food. Natural tunneling was the non-sentient method of hard mining. Some sentient tunnel miners profited of these animals to dig their own tunnels, while others walked through the tunnels some left behind to stride mine.