Mining

Mining is one of the primary ways to farm resources in Battle Arena, particularly Pixels, Crafting Material, Bonus Rocks and Finalizers.

## How to mine

First, you will need a pickaxe. You can craft one at Rank 30; better ones are available later.

**Mining Picks**

* Rank 30: Bronze Pickaxe
* Rank 70: Silver Pickaxe
* Rank 120: Golden Pickaxe
* Rank 180: Diamond Pickaxe
* Rank 250: Master Pickaxe (from pixelated mystery boxes, permanent)
* Rank 350? Legendary Pickaxe
* Rank 500: Unobtainium Pickaxe (both a time-limited and a more expensive permanent version)

Next, equip the pickaxe and go to any zone between Ye Olde Pub and Hole of Time, except Danger Zone and the Sky. Regular monster spawns will be replaced with Secret Crystals, which can only be effectively damaged using a pickaxe. Hit the pickaxe until it dies.

**WARNING: You must kill the crystal in under 120 seconds. After 120 seconds, the crystal explodes, and you die.**

Crystals are always rare enemies. Their stats are listed below. In Hardcore mode, they have 1.3x level, capped at 9001; 3.5x Health and 1.5x exp / YC / Pixels.

SC1

Occasionally, a stronger type of crystal will spawn. It is always epic, and is colored differently from the usual one. These offer 10x the exp and yellow coins and 20x the pixels.

SC2

Because SC2 is a different bestiary entry, the stat "increased epic encounter rate" has no effect on encountering more of them.

Hardcore adds an independent roll for epic crystals at a 2% chance. Beginning with the Diamond Pickaxe, epic SC2 crystals have a chance to appear on either casual or hardcore (see table above). Worst Moon mode adds an independent roll with a 4% chance. Apocalypse mode also adds an independent roll with a 4% chance.

The quality of your loot is determined in part by the crystal's level. The loot level is increased by (Level of Secret Crystal) / 1000, rounded up.

## Recommended Setup

How to effectively damage crystals? Regular hits deal about 2000 damage, and this cannot be altered by your Attack bonus, Equipment Attack, or Attack Power. Critical hits and Boss Damage, however, all work very well against crystals.

You may find that your pickaxe is rather slow. This can be fixed by wearing a Speed ring, using Speed enhancers on your pickaxe and finalizing your pickaxe. You should aim to cap Attack Speed (25) without the speed ring, as this lets you use another ring, which can be very useful. This is usually the first priority while mining.

* Extra attack speed above the cap of 25 will convert into double hit chance at a rate of 1 attack speed = 1% Double Hit Chance. Double hit chance is capped at 95%. You can easily reach 95% double hit chance early on with a speed ring. Ideally, later on you will use speed enhancers on the mining pick and skills to reach or near the cap, so that your ring slot is free for Cruelty (or Critical as a worse alternative).

* Secondly, you should hit the cap (or be as close as possible to hitting it) for Critical Chance (95%). Critical hits deal multiplied damage without any additional penalty. For this reason, you want to raise your Critical Damage as much as possible.
* Thirdly, all of this is further boosted by Boss damage. Boss damage and Critical damage stack multiplicatively, therefore you should try to maximize the product of the two for maximum damage.

You may consider using buffs to assist you while mining. However, because you always deal fixed base damage to crystals, Mastery potions are useless. Power potions are also useless because raising attack does not increase damage against crystals. You should therefore use Reward potion for increased rewards, or the Invisible Ally skill 'Enrage', which boosts Boss and Non-Boss damage.

Rings to use: Cruelty (preferred), Speed, Critical, Luck.

If you don't have any rings or you just died and lost all of them, go do a Dark Pyramid run. Even if you don't do any damage at all the bonus at the end gives you around 8 rings if you had none to start with.

### **Skills**

Your skills and colored bonuses on equipment should be based on the concepts above. Useful skills to invest in:

* Quick Attack (if Anti-idling or using Ctrl+Click)
* MP Recovery (a few points to help with MP consumption if using Quick Attack)
* Combo Critical and Combo Reward (you will not be attacked, easily obtaining the bonuses from these skills)
* Weapon Booster
* Critical Force
* Keen Eyes
* Double Hit
* Coup de Grace (100% crit when enemy HP falls under certain percentage. Not as useful with 95% crit chance. Has a good synergy with status effects)
* Status skill (to increase damage with Coup de Grace)
* Money UP
* Five Leaf Clover

### Choosing an Invisible Ally

Choose an Invisible Ally with some combination of Attack speed (if not capped), Boss damage, Enrage or Increased Reward. Good choices for this are, in ascending level order:

* Fireball (+3 attack speed, +5% Damage)
* Fire/Frost/Nature Dragon (+4% Damage + 24s Enrage)
* Bloodsurfer (+15% Damage)
* Any Special Arena monster (varies from +12% to +50% Boss damage and above). Special Mention: Dark Stone (+52% Boss damage and 45s Enrage)
* Any Tower of Doom monsters (+40% up to +80% Boss Damage)
* Corruption Boss IAs (+60% Boss damage)
* Secret Dungeon Boss IAs (+58%~+60% Boss Damage)
* Chuck Norris (+80% Boss Damage)
* Chaos (+90% Boss Damage)
* CHAOS (+120% Boss Damage)

### Equipment

Crystal Armor and Armor of Loot are nice sets for mining, especially since you get the Crystal Armor from crystals. If none of those is available, use anything you have, preferably something with Critical Damage, Critical Chance and/or Attack speed. Adjust orange bonuses according to your needs at Abandoned Lab (if you're above rank 180). The same goes for accessories. Preferred pendant: Collector's Pendant. While wearing the Collector's Pendant, you have a chance to obtain an item that is usually crafted, fairly often with even higher stats than the crafted ones.

## Other Advice

* Mining can also be idled and is a great way to accumulate resources while not actively playing. The same rules as above will apply, but you don't need to max quick attack. In fact, if you have two picks available, you can use a spirit rock on your second pick, as the spirit idle attack has a 14% faster delay for your idling. This is not recommended for your main pick, since you lose the quick attack skill which is so fast for anti-idle mining.
* As of v1835, you can Ctrl+Click on a BA skill to automatically perform it for thirty minutes. This is very useful for using quick attack on crystals while semi-idling.
* When using a pickaxe, Specialised Skill becomes MINE!!!!, which instantly kills any crystal and increases its droprate. This is useful to spam if anti-idling.
* Mining crystals while in Hardcore Apocalypse mode is one of the only ways to get the very useful SI Bonus Rocks, a late-game Battle Arena resource. You can find a guide on getting these rocks here.