Digging

By: Jackjones on 9/29/2024

Digging in Wurm Online is a fundamental skill which is required to terraform the land and to gather resources for other crafting professions.

The Basics

Slope Difficulty

Every 5 slope adds 1 difficulty to digging. You could grind up skill in Digging by digging at the base of a high slope (max 300).

Tile Difficulty

These are the base difficulties per tile. They can be adjusted by the formula: 1 + (the highest slope from that corner/5, rounded down):

TileDifficulty
Dirt0
Peat0
Sand10
Moss10
Clay20
Tundra20
Marsh30
Tar35
Steppe40

Don’t Level for Skillgain

Using the “Level” action produces only 33% of potential skill gains compared to digging to inventory or digging-to-pile. Warning:Dig-to-pile might set off some anti-macro code if you are putting items into a BSB; this would stop skill gains.

Shovel Quality (and Enchantments)

Most likely, you will see best gains using a “skiller” type shovel at 1QL with a high as possible CoC enchant. You want long action timers, so no WoA is needed.

You can save your high QL / runed / WoA enchanted shovel when you need higher QL resources for other professions, like Pottery.

SkillVein
0-70Dirt / Sand / Moss
50+Clay
80+Tar

Other Techniques

Just terraform a couple (2 - 3) large deeds, like I did, over a ten year period. With my last big deed project, I lowered every tile of my 3000+ tile deed by 50 dirts. I never grinded Digging, but it is my highest gathering skill.