Energy Is the Only Real Mining Cost
Every mining decision in TerraX reduces to one exchange rate: ore per energy. Your daily energy bar is fixed by level, it refills once at midnight UTC, and every 4-energy charge you spend on coal is a charge not spent on gold. The calculator turns that budget into concrete numbers, and the pattern it reveals is the one that shapes the whole early game: upgrading your pickaxe does not just unlock new ores, it cuts the charge time on every ore below it, which compounds into dramatically more ore per session. The full loop, floors and worker mechanics are in the mining guide.
Two Economies, One Ore Table
Mining is really two separate systems that happen to share the same ores, and the game never puts them side by side. Active mining is fast on the clock, costs 4 energy a charge and is the only method that rolls side drops. An idle expedition costs a flat energy price per run, spends real hours instead of your attention, and returns roughly twice the ore per energy up to silver tier. Neither is the answer on its own: the players who out-produce everyone keep expeditions running around the clock and spend loose energy actively on whatever ore they are short of. The comparison view puts both rates on one chart so you can see, for your pickaxe, exactly where the crossover sits.
What the Numbers Are Really For
Ore is not the end product; it is the input to the forge chains that produce everything worth owning or selling. Use this page together with the forge calculator: that tool tells you a Molten Pickaxe needs a mountain of specific ores, and this one tells you how many days that mountain costs at your level with your current pickaxe. When the answer is too many, the player market is the other mine: buying ingots with money earned selling something you farm faster is often the strictly better trade.
Questions Players Actually Ask
How does active mining work in TerraX?
You swing at shared world nodes at 4 energy per charge. Charge time is the node's health divided by your pickaxe damage, in 500ms ticks, and each completed charge pays a random yield between 1 and the ore's max, so the expected value is half the max, plus a 30% chance of the ore's side drop. Nodes respawn on a shared 60-minute clock, so high-tier ore is a server-wide supply everyone competes for.
What decides which ores I can mine?
Pickaxe tier. Each ore has a tier from coal at 1 to Dragon Glass at 7, and your pickaxe tier must meet or beat it. The calculator greys out everything your selected pickaxe cannot touch, which is also a preview of exactly what the next pickaxe unlocks.
Is idle or active mining more efficient?
Per energy, idle expeditions average roughly twice the ore up to silver tier: a node's expected idle yield is (maxYield+1)/2 against the run's flat energy cost, while active pays maxYield/2 per 4-energy charge. Active wins on wall-clock speed and rolls side drops. The practical answer is both: keep expeditions running always, and spend spare energy actively on the ore you are short of.
How is the ore-per-day figure calculated?
Your level sets max energy (250 at level 1, plus 10 per level). Divided by 4 energy per charge, that is your daily charge count, multiplied by the ore's expected yield per charge. It assumes the whole bar goes into one ore, which nobody actually does, so read it as a ceiling.
Every charge costs your pickaxe the ore's durability damage, from 1 on coal to 15 on Dragon Glass. The starter Peasants Pickaxe and the Krampus Pickaxe never break; everything else needs repair, and the calculator's per-100-ore figures let you price a session's wear before you start.
Which mine floor should I send my worker to?
The deepest one your pickaxe tier actually opens, but with a caveat the game never spells out: a floor only spawns ores your pickaxe can break, so entering a deep floor with a marginal pickaxe gives you a thinner node mix, not a richer one. The floors view lists all four with their real node mix, yield, energy, duration and ore per energy for your exact pickaxe, so you can see when the deeper floor is genuinely better and when it is a downgrade.
Why did my coal yield suddenly drop?
Coal is the only ore with a daily anti-inflation governor. Once you have banked 5,000 coal in a UTC day every further coal is cut by 20%, then 50% past 7,000, 75% past 9,000 and 90% past 12,000, with a 5% floor. The penalty applies to the whole of the next batch rather than ramping through it, so stopping just short of a threshold and switching ore is worth more than pushing through. The upkeep view plots the curve and marks where you are.
How many runs do I need for a specific amount of ore?
Set the ore and the amount in the goal view and it costs both routes end to end: charges or runs, wall-clock time, energy and pickaxe wear, and it names whichever is fastest. It also tells you what else an expedition brings back, since a run mining your target ore is usually returning two or three others at the same time.
Where does this data come from?
The same balance files that seed the live game's database: ore health, yields, XP and tiers from the ore data, pickaxe stats from the tool data, and node hit points from the world maps. When the game rebalances, this page rebuilds from the updated files.
Coal
Copper
Iron
Silver
Gold
Adamantium
Dragon Glass