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Chronoromancer

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Mining System - Complete Guide

Activities & BusinessesSimplified Chinese availableV0.9.6.0
Guide noticeThis page contains gameplay and story spoilers and may describe mature systems.

The Mining minigame is a match-and-cascade puzzle game where you swing pickaxes at an 8×11 grid of rocks, gems, and ores. Every tile broken gives fragments of one of six precious resources, and chaining the right tiles together creates explosive cascades that can destroy half the board in a single click. With three pickaxes that each behave differently and rare key items hidden in the rubble, mining is one of the most resource-rich activities in Chronoromancer.

This guide covers everything: how to start, the three pickaxes and what they do, every tile type and what it gives you, the cascade and chain-reaction system, key item stones, and where to find more pickaxes outside of mining itself.

Table of Contents

Quick Start

To start mining you need exactly two things:

  1. At least one pickaxe of any kind in your inventory (new games start with 1 iron pickaxe)
  2. At least 10 energy in your stat pool

Travel to the Mountain Foothills in the Medieval era (Village Outskirts district) and use the Mining action. The minigame opens immediately. Each entry costs 30 minutes and 30 energy. If you have zero pickaxes, the action will be greyed out.

Tiles are clicked one at a time. Every click costs 1 of your selected pickaxe and 10 energy. Rocks break, gems sparkle, and you collect fragments toward six different ingots and gems.

Locations

Mountain Foothills (Medieval Outskirts)

The only location where you can mine. The path to the foothills is also where you'll find Gem, the dwarven miner who lives here from 7 AM to 5 PM. Mining itself doesn't have a time restriction — you can swing your pickaxe at any hour of any day.

Gem also sells bundles of 5 iron pickaxes for $200, once per day, as a shopping action at this location. If you ever run dry on iron, this is your reliable source.

The Three Pickaxes

You start with the iron pickaxe and earn the others through play. Each one has a different role.

Iron Pickaxe (default)

The basic pickaxe and your bread-and-butter. Hits any normal tile for 1 damage per click. Cannot break bedrock or glass cubes.

  • Strength: 1
  • Special: None
  • Best for: Everyday mining, breaking basic rocks and gems, triggering cascades

Copper Pickaxe

Stronger than iron, and crucially, the only pickaxe besides diamond that can break bedrock.

  • Strength: 2 (kills multi-hit tiles in half the clicks)
  • Special: Breaks bedrock in one click
  • Best for: Clearing bedrock when it's blocking a good cascade, finishing tough multi-hit tiles faster

Diamond Pickaxe

The premium tool. High damage per swing, breaks anything, and always triggers a bonus hit on a random adjacent tile every time you click.

  • Strength: 5 (smashes most multi-hit tiles in 1–2 clicks)
  • Special: Breaks both bedrock and glass cubes in one click
  • Bonus hit: Every click also damages a random adjacent tile (any of the 8 surrounding tiles, including diagonals) for full 5 damage. The bonus does NOT consume an extra pickaxe — it's free.
  • Best for: Tough multi-hit tiles like rose gem, queenstone, and the rare key item stones. Also amazing for cleanup since the bonus hit can chain into matches.

The bonus hit is the diamond's signature move. If your bonus hit lands on a power-up, that power-up triggers immediately. If it lands on bedrock or glass, those are destroyed too.

Switching Between Them

You select your active pickaxe from the three squares at the bottom-left of the mining screen. The selected pickaxe has a yellow border around it. A pickaxe that has run out of charges goes grey and can't be selected.

You can switch pickaxes between any two clicks — there's no penalty for swapping mid-session.

How a Mining Session Works

When you click a tile:

  1. The selected pickaxe loses 1 charge.
  2. You lose 10 energy.
  3. Your pickaxe swings (animation plays on the clicked tile, and on the bonus tile if you're using diamond).
  4. The tile takes damage equal to your pickaxe's strength. If it breaks, you get its rewards.
  5. Tiles fall down to fill the gaps (gravity), and new tiles spawn at the top.
  6. The game checks for matches — any 3+ tiles of the same type in a straight line will all break together.
  7. Cascades continue as long as new matches keep forming after gravity.

A single click can sometimes trigger an enormous chain — gravity refills, a new match forms, that match damages neighbors, those neighbors include a power-up that explodes, the explosion clears more tiles, gravity again, another match, and so on. This is where mining gets genuinely fun.

A session ends when you click the X at the top-left, press ESC, or press Space.

The Mining Screen

Top Bar

  • X close button (top left) — exits the session at any time.
  • ENERGY X/Y — your current energy versus your maximum.
  • Energy resource icon — clickable to spend one of your stored energy items, restoring 25 energy (or 50 if you have Willow's Enhanced Healing). The number next to it shows how many you have left.

Left Side

Six rows showing your current totals for each resource:

  • Iron Ingots: X — Fragments X/100
  • Silver Ingots: X — Fragments X/100
  • Mithril Ingots: X — Fragments X/100
  • Mineral Clusters: X — Fragments X/100
  • Crystals: X — Fragments X/100
  • Gems: X — Fragments X/100

Every 100 fragments rolls over into +1 of the whole resource. The fraction counter resets to 0 (or to the leftover, if you got more than 100 in one go).

Bottom Left

The three pickaxe selectors. Iron on the left, copper in the middle, diamond on the right. The selected one has a yellow border. The number on each shows how many charges you have.

Right Side

The 8×11 grid where the action happens. Multi-hit tiles show their remaining HP as a small number on the tile.

Tile Types and Rewards

The grid can spawn 30 different tile types: 22 regular group-spawned tiles, bedrock, and the seven rare key item stones. Here's the full list and what each one gives when consumed.

Mineral / Rock-type Tiles

Tile HP Reward
Rock 1 1 fragment: 50% iron, 40% silver, 10% mithril
Iron Ore 1 +1 iron fragment, 10% chance of 1 random other resource
Gold 1 +1 iron, +1 silver, 10% chance of 1 random other
Coal 1 +1 iron, 15% chance of 1 mithril, 10% chance of 1 gem
Metal 1 3 fragments, each randomly chosen between iron / silver / mithril
Metal Star 3 +2 iron, +2 silver, +2 mithril, +1 random of cluster / crystal / gem
Metal Fragments 8 +1 iron, +1 silver, +1 mithril
Molten 5 +2 iron, +1 silver, +1 mithril, 40% chance of 1 random of cluster / crystal / gem
Bedrock special 2 fragments, each independently random across all 6 resources

Bedrock cannot be broken by iron — only copper or diamond — and four of them spawn at the start of every session as obstacles. During gravity refill, new tiles have a small 1.5% chance to respawn bedrock while fewer than four bedrock tiles are currently on the board.

Gem-type Tiles

Tile HP Reward
Emerald 1 +1 cluster, 40% chance of 1 random of crystal / gem
Ruby 1 +2 cluster, 20% chance of 1 random of crystal / gem
Rainbow Gem 15 +3 cluster, +1 crystal, +1 gem
Rose Gem 30 +1 of all 6 resources
Iridescent 25 +2 of all 6 resources

Iridescent and rose gem are the jackpot tiles — destroying one gives a chunk of every resource simultaneously.

Crystal-type Tiles (Panthers)

Tile HP Reward
Panther Green 10 3 fragments, each random from cluster / crystal / gem
Panther Blue 10 3 fragments, each random from cluster / crystal / gem
Panther Pink 10 3 fragments, each random from cluster / crystal / gem

All three panther tiles are functionally identical for rewards — only the visuals differ.

Special Tiles

Tile HP Reward
Energy 1 +40 energy (capped at your max)
Repair 1 +3 of whichever pickaxe you used to break it

The energy tile is hugely valuable — net gain of +30 energy after the 10 energy your click cost. The repair tile is one of the only ways to passively replenish your pickaxes mid-session.

Power-Ups

Tile Effect
Bomb 3×3 explosion centered on the bomb
Fireblock Destroys the entire row
Magic Cube Destroys the entire column

Power-ups don't have rewards themselves, but the tiles destroyed by their blast all give their normal rewards. Power-ups in a chain reaction will trigger each other, and a single click on one power-up adjacent to another can destroy massive portions of the grid.

Indestructible Tiles

Tile Notes
Glass Cube Only diamond pickaxe can break it
Bedrock Only copper or diamond can break it

The Six Resources

All mining rewards funnel into six resource pools, each tracked as fragments (0-99) and wholes:

  • Iron Ingots — basic crafting metal
  • Silver Ingots — mid-tier metal
  • Mithril Ingots — premium metal
  • Mineral Clusters — concentrated mineral matter
  • Crystals — magical resource (also goes into your main inventory)
  • Gems — premium magical resource (also goes into your main inventory)

100 fragments of any resource = +1 whole of that resource. Crystals and gems show up in your main inventory immediately. The four ingot/cluster types are stored under "Mining Items" in the Supplies inventory screen.

Cascade Matches

After every successful click, gravity drops tiles down to fill empty spaces and new tiles spawn at the top. Then the game scans for straight lines of 3 or more tiles of the same type, horizontal or vertical only — diagonals don't count.

If a match is found:

  • All matched tiles are consumed (you get rewards for each)
  • Adjacent tiles take damage based on match size:
    • 3-match: 5 damage to adjacent multi-hit tiles
    • 4-match: 10 damage, AND adjacent repair / energy tiles are also consumed
    • 5+ match: 25 damage, repair / energy still consumed
  • Adjacent power-ups in the blast zone are triggered, kicking off a chain reaction
  • After everything settles, gravity runs again and another match check happens — cascades can chain indefinitely

Note that the match-adjacent damage only hits multi-hit tiles (the ones with HP), repair / energy tiles (only on 4+ matches), and power-ups (always triggered). It does not consume basic tiles like rock, gold, coal, etc. — those only break from direct clicks or being in the matched line itself.

Wild Rocks

Once your cascade reaches its 3rd round and beyond, a special rule kicks in: rocks become wild.

A rock tile becomes a wild substitute if it has at least one neighbor (in any of the 8 surrounding tiles) that was consumed earlier in this same cascade chain. Wild rocks count as coal, iron, or metal for the purpose of forming a match line.

So during a deep cascade, lines like rock-coal-coal, rock-iron-rock-iron, or coal-rock-rock-coal-coal can all match — provided the rocks are next to recently-broken tiles.

This is what makes deep cascades so explosive. As more tiles break, more rocks become wild, which creates more matches, which consume more tiles, which makes more rocks wild. Once you start a long chain, it tends to keep going.

Pure rock-rock-rock lines still match as a normal rock match (no wild logic needed). Lines with non-WILD_MATCHABLE basics like gold, emerald, or ruby don't accept wild rocks — they have to match exactly.

The wild status resets when your full cascade finishes; on your next click, it starts over from depth 1.

Power-Ups

The three power-up tiles are your ticket to massive cascades. They can be triggered three ways:

  1. Direct click — costs your pickaxe charge and 10 energy as normal
  2. Diamond bonus hit — your diamond's adjacent random hit can land on a power-up
  3. Cascade adjacency — when a match forms next to a power-up, the power-up fires automatically (free)

When triggered, a power-up calculates its full chain reaction upfront, then plays out the animation. If the blast zone hits another power-up, that one triggers too — and so on, recursively, all in one calculation. A bomb next to a magic cube next to a fireblock can clear half the board with a single click.

Bomb

3×3 explosion centered on the bomb. Hits the bomb itself plus the 8 surrounding tiles.

Deep cascade bonus: If a bomb is triggered while your cascade is at depth 3 or higher (the same threshold that activates wild rocks), the bomb's blast also destroys every coal tile on the board. Each coal still gives its normal reward, the gaps left behind can form new matches, and any power-ups adjacent to those destroyed coal tiles get triggered too — sometimes leading to genuinely board-clearing chains.

Fireblock

Destroys every tile in the same row.

Magic Cube

Destroys every tile in the same column.

What Power-Up Chains Destroy

Power-up chains affect every tile in their blast except for bedrock and glass cubes (those are skipped). Multi-hit tiles take 15 damage per blast and break if reduced to 0 HP. Everything else — basic tiles, other power-ups, repair, energy, key item stones — gets consumed immediately.

Key Item Stones

Seven rare and powerful key item stones can spawn during mining. Each is a unique key item that goes into your permanent collection. Most have 200 HP, while Queenstone and Aether Stone have 400 HP, making them tough to break — diamond pickaxe is highly recommended.

The seven mining stones:

  • Queenstone
  • Sword Stone
  • Brute Stone
  • Balance Stone
  • Elemental Stone
  • Twilight Stone
  • Aether Stone

Spawn Rules

  • Each spawn slot has roughly a 0.013% chance of being a key stone (extremely rare in normal play)
  • Once any one of the seven spawns during your session, no other key stone can appear until you exit and re-enter the minigame
  • Stones you already own will never spawn again — once you have it, it's permanently filtered out
  • If you somehow own all seven mining stones, no key stones will ever spawn

When a key stone is consumed, it's added to your key items list and a celebratory chime plays. All seven mining stones are upgradeable and start at level 1 when first acquired.

Strategy for Breaking Them

200 HP is a lot. With diamond pickaxe (strength 5), that's 40 direct hits — but you can speed it up considerably by:

  • Using power-up chains to land 15-damage hits on the stone
  • Diamond's bonus hit doubles your effective damage on every click (up to 10 if both the main and bonus tile are the stone)
  • 4+ matches adjacent to the stone deal 10–25 damage per match
  • Iron and copper still work, just much slower

If a stone spawns and you're low on diamond charges, switch to iron or copper to chip at it while you save diamond for the killing blow.

Pity Timer

To keep the rare items from being maddening, the game has a pity timer:

After 60 successful clicks in a single session, every spawn roll has a 3% chance of forcing either a key stone or an iridescent (whichever you don't already have this session). The pool is split evenly between unowned key stones and iridescent.

So if you've been mining a while and haven't seen anything special, the pity timer kicks in and significantly increases your odds. The 60-click counter resets every time you re-enter the minigame.

Getting More Pickaxes

You'll burn through pickaxes quickly. Here's how to restock:

Buying from Gem

  • Mountain Foothills, while Gem is present (7 AM – 5 PM)
  • Iron Pickaxes (x5) action: $200, 10 minutes
  • Once per in-game day

Pickaxe Haul (full version)

Gem also offers a premium bundle: trade 1 crystal for 10 iron + 10 copper + 10 diamond pickaxes (15 minutes, +2 Gem relationship). No daily limit — if you have crystals to spare, this is by far the fastest way to stock up on copper and diamond charges.

Battle Drops (Dungeon)

After dungeon battles, there's a chance of a free pickaxe drop. The deeper you go, the better the pickaxe — early floors drop iron, mid floors drop copper, and deep floors drop diamond. You'll see a "You found a [type] Pickaxe!" message in the battle log when one drops.

Heists (Thieves Guild)

After a successful clean getaway from a heist, there's a chance of a pickaxe drop. The fancier the neighborhood, the better the pickaxe — copper from the Gilded Row, diamond from the Noble Quarter.

Search Encounters

The Medieval Back Alley search action has a small chance to find a pickaxe stash. Choose to take it and you'll get:

  • 1–4 iron pickaxes
  • 1–3 copper pickaxes
  • A bonus diamond pickaxe based on your Luck stat (Luck-checked, so higher Luck = better odds)

Repair Tiles (Mining Itself)

Breaking a repair tile gives you +3 of whatever pickaxe you used. This is a meaningful net positive on iron (1 click in, 3 back), and it's one of the reasons cascade chains are so valuable — if a repair tile gets caught up in a cascade, you get the pickaxes for free.

Hard Cap

You can hold a maximum of 999 of each pickaxe type. Any excess is discarded, so spend down before stockpiling beyond that.

Tips and Strategy

Before Entering

  • Stock up on energy items — every click costs 10 energy, so a session with 100 energy gives you about 10 clicks before the energy tile becomes critical. Energy items inside the minigame restore 25-50 energy per use.
  • Have at least one pickaxe of any type. Don't enter at zero charges — you'll waste your time and energy cost.
  • Aim for a fresh full energy bar if you can — running out mid-cascade is frustrating.

During a Session

  • Look for cascades before clicking. If you can break a tile that will cause a 4+ match, take that over a random click. Match damage chains and bonus rewards add up fast.
  • Save diamond for power-ups, multi-hit tiles, and key stones. Don't waste diamond charges on a basic rock when iron will do the same job.
  • Use copper to clear bedrock blockages. Bedrock blocks gravity flow and can prevent good matches. New bedrock can respawn during long sessions, so copper stays useful after the starting rocks are gone.
  • The energy tile is your friend. Every energy tile broken is +30 net energy (40 restored minus the 10 you spent clicking). Prioritize them when they appear.
  • Power-up adjacency is the highest-value play. If you can trigger a power-up by matching tiles next to it (so the chain triggers it for free), you're gaining a power-up activation without spending a charge.

Long Sessions and the Pity Timer

  • The 60-click pity timer means committed players will see rare items relatively often. Plan for sessions of at least 60+ clicks if you're hunting key stones or iridescent.
  • After a key stone or iridescent has spawned in a session, the pity timer for that one is "spent" — you can still mine for the other (key stone vs iridescent), but you can't get a second key stone in the same run.

Resource Strategy

  • Mithril is the rarest of the four basic ingots. It only drops as a small chance from coal, the random pool of metal/molten/metal_star, and 10% from rock.
  • Gold tiles are the only common source of silver. If you need silver, prioritize sessions where group 2 spawns are abundant.
  • Cluster, crystal, and gem fragments mostly come from gems, panthers, and rainbow/rose/iridescent. These tiles are rarer than basic minerals, so crystal and gem fragments accumulate slower.

Don't Forget to Exit

The minigame doesn't have a win condition or auto-exit. It runs until you decide to leave. If you've cleaned up everything you wanted, just press X, ESC, or Space to return to the world.

Community discoveries

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