Mining is quite a complex skill. Yes, you can think of it as "Pick axe make block break," but there are many more factors in Mining that are included in Hypixel Skyblock and it's also one of the most consistent money making methods in the game, essentially unkillable.
This guide will cover the following:
- Mining Locations/Islands
- Leveling/Heart of the Mountain
- Gemstone Powder and Mithril Powder Mining
- Equipment (Early/Mid/Late/Hypermaxxed)
- Pets
- Technical Aspects of Skyblock Mining
Mining Locations
Mining Locations include:
- The Hub (Coal Mine)
- Gold Mine (Coal, Iron and Gold (go figure))
- Deep Caverns (Coal, Iron, Gold, Redstone, Lapis and Diamond)
- Dwarven Mines (Ores + Mithril)
- Crystal Hollows (All of the above + Gemstones)
The Hub and Gold Mine are just the gateway to get to the Deep Caverns. So just follow the regular quest line to get to the Deep Caverns which has a Mining V requirement.
The Deep Caverns is the second Mining location that is unlocked after reaching Mining V. This location has multiple levels that provide various resources. Each of these levels has its own type of Mob and resource. The player can continue their descent into the Dwarven Mines from the Obsidian Sanctuary by talking to Rhys.
~ Hypixel Wiki
Once you get to the Deep Caverns your goal is to get to the Dwarven Mines. Work your way down until you find Rhys and he'll ask for 10 x 3 of a choice of enchanted materials. There's a cheese for this, just mine 30 Lapis, hand Rhys 10 and leave and rejoin the Deep Caverns hand him another 10 and just repeat until you're in the Dwarven Mines.
Dwarven Mines is the true start of your mining journey, it has many locations that you can discovered, including the forge, keep an eye out for the giant minecarts filled with ores dotted around the place as these are great for gaining collection super fast as they have a fast respawn rate. Also has the gateway to the Crystal Hollows.
Crystal Hollows, is essentially a sandbox of minable ores and also includes 5 locations of it's own - Crystal Nucleus, Jungle, Mithril Deposits, Precursor Remnants, Goblin Holdout and the Magma Fields.
The Dwarven Mines, as well as its continuation, the Crystal Hollows, are locations that are dedicated for players to mine various unique ores. These areas have a unique way of upgrading the efficiency of the player, that being Heart of the Mountain.
~ Hypixel Wiki
Leveling and Heart of the Mountain
Leveling is fairly simple, the deeper you go the more XP you gain. Whatever you break you'll gain an amount of XP - Some Ores are better than others.
One of the better ways of leveling is completing commissions which you're eventually going to be doing plenty of to level your heart of the mountain tree. There's no point going too far into leveling the Mining skill as everything you do from this point in the guide is going to give you XP.
The Heart of the Mountain tree is a skill tree that you level up through completing commissions in the Dwarven Mines and Crystal hollows and is honestly where most people give up because yes, it can be boring but it's also incredibly rewarding.
Complete Comms and get XP, it's that simple. You should be doing these every. single. day. You get a bonus for completing them 4 where you get extra powder, mining xp and commission xp. You really and truly need to get your Heart of the Mountain tree at level 7 it makes a difference on if you want to make a lot of coin.
Some tips on leveling, get to HOTM (heart of the mountain) 3 in the Dwarven Mines by doing the commissions provided by the King and Emissaries dotted around the map. I recommend, just powering through this until you get to the Crystal Hollows as you get 1300 xp for your first 4 commissions of the day compared to the 1000xp you get from the dwarven mines. They award 400 XP compared to 100 XP as standard, so once you reach Crystal Hollows there really is no reason to do Dwarven Mines commissions. Use A Pickonimbus to mine the Gemstones and kill Yogs/Mine chests to get get Topaz - I'll get into equipment later.
Some of the best ways of grinding HOTM XP in increasing XP rate/hour are:
- Crystal Hollows Commissions (No Nucleus runs inculuded)
- Dwarven Commissions
- Crystal Hollows Commissions (with Nucleus runs)
As you can tell doing nucleus runs while doing crystal hollows commissions is the current best way to earn HOTM xp in game right now.
To set up a lobby for crystal hollows commissions, you should do the following things:
- Try to select a low day counter lobby to eliminate the chances of getting lobby closed
- Use wishing commpass in all regions to check whether the concerned structure is generated or not, sometimes important structures fail to generate.
After checking those two steps you are ready to set up lobby, use bob-ombs to create tunnels to various structures.
Powder Mining
Powder is one of the major aspects of Skyblock's Mining progression. Powder can be gained in 3 ways in skyblock, mining blocks like mithril and gemstone, commissions and treasure chest mining. The current best way to gain powder is treasure chest mining.
Treasure chest mining requires 2 main perks and 1 non-major perk. Main perks are Mole and Great explorer, you should prioritize great explorer to max before anything else. These 2 perks requires HOTM 6. The 3rd perk is Powder Buff but it requires HOTM 7.
You only require around Mole 71 to max out the cabilities of Mole to spawn treasure chests.
Equipment
Equipment, you'll want to start with any pickaxe you can until you get to the Dwarven Mines, and once you're there you'll want the following.
Early Game
- Mithril Pickaxe from Bubu
- Glacite Armor
- Pickonimbus 2000 if you have access to the Auction House.
- Silverfish Pet.
Mid Game
- Pickonimbus 2000 until you hit HOTM 6
- Gemstone Drill LT-522 at HOTM 4 if you're too lazy to kill Yogs/Bal for Topaz and have coin.
- Gemstone Gauntlet when you hit HOTM 6, later upgrading to Pristine 5. I'd recommend starting to add Gemstones going through each level up until Perfects (don't worry about these too much but at least get rare gemstones). Just to add, Gemstone Gauntlet is amazing for the price.
- Yog Armor is fine, if you want and have lots of coin to spare Jaded Sorrow is a good set to start but honestly just start saving for Divan's Armor since Sorrow is quite expensive considering you'll end up getting rid of it to get Divan's anyways.
- Divan's Armor is the best in slot, but it needs to be maxed I recommend putting 3/5 Chambers and adding a Jaderald to each piece when you can afford it. The chambers to unlock is fortune and pristine.
- Silverfish pet.
- Legndary Bal pet.
- Mithril golem if you're into that sort of thing.
- Legndary Scatha if you're rich, legendary is kinda the only viable one.
Late-ish Game
- Gemstone Gauntlet - Seriously, you can still use this just put perfects on it and the Auspicious reforge.
- Titanium Drill DR-X655, once you start get to the point you feel you can afford an upgrade the X655 drill is great - you can start with the X555 but I would still stick to the Gemstone Gauntlet. Try to max this drill as much as possible.
- Divan's Armor - you should definitely have this with at least 3/5 chambers unlocked at this point with perfects and Jaded, maybe even recombobulated. Finish maxing this out with the other chambers.
- Blue Cheese Goblin Omelette on the drill.
Late Game +
- Divan's Drill
- Completely Maxed Divan Set
- Legendary Bal Pet + Quick Claw
- Legendary Scatha Pet + Quick Claw
- Perfect Gemstones all the things.
- At least 7m/7m Mithril/Gemstone Powder.
Techinal Aspect of Skyblock Mining
Tick Speed and Insta mining
Blocks have different type of strengths and resistance. These blocks have certain tick speeds at which they will be mined at given Mining speed. For example, Ruby has the following trend:
- 20 Tick > 3,366 ⸕
- 19 Tick > 3,539 ⸕
- 18 Tick > 3,730 ⸕
- 17 Tick > 3,943 ⸕
- 16 Tick > 4,182 ⸕
- 15 Tick > 4,452 ⸕
- 14 Tick > 4,759 ⸕
- 13 Tick > 5,112 ⸕
- 12 Tick > 5,521 ⸕
- 11 Tick > 6,001 ⸕
- 10 Tick > 6,572 ⸕
- 9 Tick > 7,264 ⸕
- 8 Tick > 8,118 ⸕
- 7 Tick > 9,201 ⸕
This indicates mining speed is only worth updrading if you can reach another threshold, any thing lower to your thought threshold will have no impact on your block mining speed.
There is also a technique of insta mining in Skyblock, but it requires extremely optimized and Maxed gear and only a few block can be insta mined, Blocks of interest to instamine and there insta mining speed are given below
- Hard Stone -> 1500 ⸕
- Dwarven Gold -> 36,001 ⸕
- Obsidian -> 30,001 ⸕
- Gray Mithril Blocks -> 30,001 ⸕
- Light Blue mithril Blocks -> 48,001 ⸕
As we can see they require high mining speed outputs.
Blue Cheese Swap
There is an upgrade module named Blue Cheese Goblin Omelette. It increases your HOTM perks by +1, also at max level. We are only interested in the +1 level in mining ablities. For example Mining Speed Boost ablity has 300% boost for 20 sec and with blue cheese it becomes 400% boost for 25 sec. This upgrade is big because it allows to get to another tick of blocks or to insta mining threshold of certain blocks.
You can perform a blue cheese swap to gain benefits of blue cheese omelette without having it on main drill. Here is how you can do it,
- Get Blue Cheese omelette on any drill (ANY DRILL WORKS!)
- Do the following swap with hotkey Main drill -> Blue Cheese Drill -> Main drill
- There is only 1s window to perform that swap as the server will take time to update your mining stat
- This is done to get combined benefit of blue cheese goblin omelette and Sunny side goblin omelette combined for the Mining speed boost duration.
To conclude, there's so much I could go into detail on but I'm going to provide some resources to help you as these guides are already so good there's no reason to just repeat them. These are sort of in order of which you should be reading.