Malmr

Malmr

Tap Left Alt with a pickaxe out and vein mining is on. Every blow you land on an ore deposit or a

boulder then fills a bar instead of breaking the chunk you hit. When the bar reaches 100%, the

whole deposit breaks at once and all of its ore drops, including the chunks that were still under

the ground. Stone and each metal open at their own Pickaxes level, late, and once you have beaten

the boss of their biome.

Malmr is Old Norse for ore, and for metal. The mod is about both: you mine the ore, and it

unlocks by the metal it smelts into.

Why

A copper deposit comes apart in a lot of chunks, and chasing them one at a time is the part of

mining nobody enjoys. You walk around the rock, dig after the bits that sank into the ground,

and pick up the ore from five places. Vein mining mods exist for that. The popular one breaks

the whole rock on one hit while you hold a key. That turns a deposit into a click, and you have

it from the moment you install it.

Malmr is slower than that on purpose. The bar only fills as fast as your swings would have

broken the rock by hand, so a deposit still costs you about as many swings, as much stamina and

as much pickaxe wear. You save the walking between chunks and the digging after the buried ones.

It also opens late. Stone opens at Pickaxes 20, copper at 30 and bloodgold at 80, so you have

mined each one by hand for a while before this changes anything. Each also waits for the boss of

the biome it comes from. With Vandi installed that

means the boss beaten at one star, and without it the boss beaten once.

Stone is on the list because building takes a lot of it, and a boulder is the same chore as a

copper deposit: many chunks, some of them buried. It opens first, at 20, because stone is the

first thing anybody mines. It waits for Eikthyr, the Meadows boss.

How it works

• Tap Left Alt with a pickaxe in your hands. A small gold "Vein" appears just above the

crosshair. Tap it again to switch it off. It stays on until you do, across swings, tool

changes and deposits.

• Swing at any chunk of a deposit that is open to you. The chunk does not break. The damage your

blow would have done to it goes into the bar instead, and the usual damage number still floats

up.

• The bar sits just under the crosshair while you look at the deposit or have just hit it. It is

a thin gold bar with the name and the percentage under it, like "Copper vein 45%".

• 100% is the health of every chunk still standing, buried ones included. When the bar gets

there, the deposit breaks. The chunks go from the top down, each drops its ore where it was,

and ore from under the ground pops up to the surface. An ore deposit comes down in a fraction

of a second. A big rock takes longer, because Malmr breaks only as much of it each frame as

the game can take without stuttering.

• The bar is saved on the deposit. Walk away, switch tools or log out, and it is still there when

you come back. A friend with vein mining on can finish it for you.

• If somebody mines chunks off the same deposit by hand in the meantime, the total shrinks and

the percentage goes up with it.

• If a deposit grows back, which is what Dvala does to the veins in a dungeon it restocks, its

bar starts again from empty.

• If your pickaxe is too weak for the rock, you get the game's own "too hard" and the bar does

not move.

• With vein mining on and a metal you have not opened yet, you mine the normal way. Once per

deposit the top left of the screen tells you what is missing, for example "Iron veins need

Pickaxes 40 and Bonemass beaten at one star through Vandi".

• A whole rock that has not cracked yet, like a copper deposit you have not hit before, breaks

into its chunks the normal way first. The bar starts on the cracked deposit.

• When a metal opens, the game tells you in the middle of the screen, once, says what opened it

and names the key. That happens on the level-up or on the boss kill, whichever came last.

Each swing costs stamina, wears the p