Stonewards Mining and Gold: How to Get Rich Fast

The economy changed on August 21

If you read a Stonewards money guide written before Hotfix 0.1.7, throw it out. That patch contains the single most consequential balance line in Early Access so far:

“Rebalanced Gold earned from digging. Digging should now reward noticeably more Gold and feel fairer compared to combat. (We will keep tuning it as we go!)”

Before that, players were complaining about exactly this. A thread titled “not much money sources” and another on “Gold drop balance, heavy combat bias” are both on the Steam hub, and the fix followed. The studio’s own note says tuning continues, so expect this to move again in the September update.

Where gold comes from

Four sources are documented in official patch notes:

There is also a Silver Coin in the game — players search for it and it is a distinct currency term, but no patch note has described what it does, so this page will not guess.

The Artificer is the money class

Read the 0.1.7 bomb change again: a coin roll per block destroyed, not per explosion. An Artificer bomb thrown into a dense wall of terrain is now a slot machine with one pull per block.

That is also why the class has needed the most bug fixes around resources:

• 0.1.4 — fixed Artificer bombs destroying resource veins without dropping all expected resources.
• 0.1.6 — fixed a resource duplication issue that could occur when throwing bombs at a specific distance from terrain, and fixed blocks destroyed by bombs not counting toward missions or the end-of-run recap.
• 0.1.7 — resources dropped by bombs no longer spawn inside terrain geometry.

The catch: at 11.1% global unlock, the Artificer is the rarest class in the game. Most players never get to use the best money engine — see the unlock rates.

Ores and materials

The store page describes the haul generically as “precious metals, rare materials, and whatever shiny rocks look important enough to steal.” The patch notes name three specific ones:

• Platinum Ore — Hotfix 0.1.4 fixed it “missing its icon, causing errors that prevented it from being picked up or used.” If you have an older save where platinum vanished on pickup, that was the bug. It is still the top hit on the forum: a thread called “[SOLVED] Can’t pick up platinum”.
• Map 1 Stone — a map-specific resource. Hotfix 0.1.4 fixed props on Map 2 dropping it instead of the correct Map 2 resource.
• Parchment — Hotfix 0.1.3 fixed “an incorrect resource requirement for the Parchment on Map 2”, linking it to the lore page collectible.

The pattern worth taking away: resources are map-specific, and the studio treats a resource dropping on the wrong map as a bug.

Three habits that pay

1. Take more than one trip. The mine reopens after every wave; the loop is designed around repeated short runs, not one long expedition. A well-known community video on hidden mechanics lists “multiple mining trips between waves” among the things the game never tells you.
2. Bring an Artificer if the party has one. Per-block coin rolls scale with how much terrain you can delete.
3. Do not skip missions. Gold Coin missions are a documented, rebalanced source, and since 0.1.6 the Character Screen shows what each mission unlocks.

Where the money goes

Two sinks matter. The Blacksmith is the persistent one — Hotfix 0.1.5 raised its maximum level from 101 to 999, which is a nine-fold extension of the upgrade ceiling and the clearest signal in the patch record that the studio expects gold income to keep climbing. The per-run sink is the forge: arrows, wall repairs, and rings and tomes.

Note one deposit bug that misled early players: until Hotfix 0.1.5 you could “continue depositing resources into the Blacksmith or Wall Builder from any distance by holding the interact button.” That is fixed; you have to be there now.

Related

• Rings and tomes: what to spend it on
• All 8 classes, including the Artificer
• Waves and the mining clock