The ore veins are where metal enters the game. A miner works them with an iron pickaxe for copper, silver, gold and iron ore, and that ore is the front end of the chain that finishes with coins stamped in a player’s own name.
What they are
Four gatherables, one per metal:
- Copper vein — copper ore
- Silver vein — silver ore
- Gold vein — gold ore
- Iron vein — iron ore
They behave exactly like every other gatherable in SL Colonies. Equip the tool, left-click the vein, wait for the chat line telling you what you got. If you have not read Gathering Materials yet, read that first — everything in it applies here.
The tool
You need an iron pickaxe. Nothing else will open a vein, and the same pickaxe works on all four of them.
Take it out so it is in your hand, then click. Gathering takes the same amount of time on every vein — gold is no slower to mine than copper. The difference between them is not the work, it is the wait afterwards.
How long they take to come back
Veins are the slow end of gathering, and they are not all set the same:
- The two base veins are quick by vein standards — one comes back the next day, the other in three days.
- Silver and gold come back every seven days.
That is the number a region owner needs to plan around. One gold vein is a gold vein a miner can work once a week. If you want mining to be a profession anyone can make a living at on your land, put down several of each rather than one of each.
What the ore feeds
The ore is not the point. The chain is:
- A miner works the veins for ore.
- The smelter turns ore into ingots.
- The smith turns ingots into bags of blank coins.
- The coin mint turns the blanks into coins issued under a player’s own name, and they become that player’s coins.
This is why the HUD changed. It reads coins now, and it names whose coins they are — the currency in your pocket was minted by a player, out of ore another player dug out of a hillside.
The owner menu
Long left click the vein — hold the left button down, then let go — and you get the owner menu. It is the same menu every gatherable of ours carries, so the reset, security and hover text controls sit where you expect them.
The part worth setting is spawn points.
Spawn points
Once a vein has been gathered it does not have to come back where it was. Set spawn points and it can return anywhere on your sim, in any rotation you like — so the seam a miner emptied this morning turns up in a different part of the hills tomorrow, which is a good deal more interesting than a permanent mine face.
If you do not use the feature, nothing breaks. The vein simply comes back exactly where it stood.
The product page is here: https://slcolonies.com/treasure/copper-vein