Copper in Graveyard Keeper 2

Copper is the first metal you dig out of the ground yourself, and the veins are not far. Leave the house and turn left, and they sit in the scrub as pale rocks with green streaks running through them. Five swings of a pickaxe opens one.

What makes them worth walking to is that they come back. A vein you break is replaced by another vein in the same spot, which makes copper the only metal in the game that regrows where you mined it.

The veins are left of the house, and they grow back

Each vein has five hit points and costs one energy a swing, so a full vein is five energy and gives up three Copper Nugget. The Miner perk raises that to four, and with the Jeweler or Miner perk in hand a Gem sometimes comes out with the ore at a one in five chance per rank.

Breaking one also pays 2 into your technology points, which is small on its own and adds up over a morning’s mining. The vein counts toward The Copper Rush at the same time, and that track is where the perks come from.

Required mastery 2, which a Rusty Pickaxe alone does not meet

Point at a vein and the game asks for a required mastery of 2 in Smithing, the red track. Mastery is not one number you level up. It is the sum of what your tool brings and what you have bought on the talent tree, which the game says plainly when it teaches you about zombie workers: you raise talent by giving better tools or by unlocking new talent points.

The four pickaxes are rated 1, 2, 4 and 6. A Rusty Pickaxe brings a single point, so it is one short of a copper vein on its own, and a single Smithing level covers the gap. A Bronze Pickaxe brings two and clears the vein with nothing else.

Your first Smithing point is cheaper than it looks. Armed and Ready I and Defense Architect I both complete on a single craft or a single defensive building, and each pays one talent point into the red track, which buys the first Smithing level outright.

Study your first nugget instead of smelting it

One Copper Nugget and two Science at the Study Table returns 20 and 10. It takes six seconds, or four with the Science perk, and drains two energy a tick while it runs.

Set that against the 2 a vein pays for being mined. A single studied nugget is worth ten veins of swinging, and it is the largest return the early game offers for one item you can be holding within a minute of walking out of your door.

Copper does not become bronze until four nodes in

The bronze branch opens at 5 with Bronze Works, which grants the Wooden Anvil and the first nails. Bronze Melting follows at 10 and brings Furnace I, and at that point bronze comes out of scrap rather than ore.

Ore does not enter the picture until Bronze Forge, 20 on the node and 65 once you count the three in front of it. That node is what grants the ore recipe, the Sluice Box and Tin all at once, so copper sitting in your bag before it is copper you cannot use.

The recipe itself is three Copper Nugget, one Tin and twenty Fuel, and it returns four Bronze Ingot in nine seconds at Furnace I or II. The Fireman perk adds a fifth. One vein fills one smelt exactly, which is a tidy way to think about a mining run: every vein you break is four bars.

The furnace is the expensive part of the setup at six Piece of stone and twelve Brick. The anvil beside it is one Short Log and one Stone, which is close enough to free.

Tin comes out of the river, not out of a mine

Bronze needs tin and there is no tin vein anywhere. It is washed out of river sand at the Sluice Box, which costs four Board and four Bronze Nails and arrives with the same node that grants the ore recipe.

Three Sand goes in and two or three Tin comes out, in five seconds, at one energy a tick. Sand comes out of river pits, four to a pit, and those pits refill themselves the way the veins do.

The game introduces the whole thing as a joke between two characters when you place the box.

Don’t tell me you need sand too. / Of course I’ll need sand. / Good thing there’s plenty near the river. / Who knows… maybe we’ll even find gold in it one day. Ha ha.

On placing the Sluice Box

The joke turns out to be a mechanic. With the Gold Digger perk, which sits directly behind Miner on the red track, a wash has a forty percent chance per rank of turning up a Golden nugget alongside the tin.

The Copper Rush pays for the perks that make copper better

Every vein you break adds one to The Copper Rush, an inspiration with six levels that wants 3, 10, 25, 50, 100 and 250 veins. The first two claim for nothing, then the price rises through 1, 3, 10 and 20, and each level returns a talent point into Smithing except the last, which returns two.

Those points are the whole reason to keep mining after you have enough ore. Miner costs one and gives an extra nugget on every vein forever, Fireman costs one and gives an extra bar on every smelt, and Gold Digger sits behind Miner and turns the sluice box into an occasional gold mine.

Copper itself is worth nothing in coin. No vendor in the town buys a nugget, its base price is zero, and the same is true of tin, so there is no version of this where you mine copper to sell it. It is a material and only ever a material.