Solarpunk: Complete Mining Guide

Mining is a little more frustrating than farming in Solarpunk, and that's mostly because your pickaxe will break, forcing you to keep making them if you want to gather ore. And you do want to gather a lot of ore, since you need multiple types for crafting and upgrading your airship in order to progress in the game.

I'm fairly certain that I've gone through at least 10 pickaxes already, and some of them were the more durable iron versions. Because of this, I recommend either keeping the components for the basic pickaxe on you, which would be two sticks and three stones, so you can keep crafting them as needed, or keep extra pickaxes on you, which will take more inventory space than components would.

Mining Basics

The island you start on only has iron ore, which you'll find by the tiny lake. There are some nodes that are standing, and in the middle of them, there's what looks like a floor of nodes. The floor ones will give you infinite iron ore, but your pickaxe loses durability much quicker when you harvest this type.

The infinite source of ore isn't unique to iron, and you'll be able to find similar nodes for other ore types as you unlock the ability to travel to more islands.

Once you have some iron ore, you need a furnace to process it. You can unlock the furnace with three stones using the research table. You'll then need 15 stones to craft a furnace. Once it's placed, you need to put the ore in the top-left slot, fuel in the bottom, and then collect the product from the top-right slot.

All Ore Types

There are three ore types in Solarpunk:

• Copper
• Quartz
• Iron

Of course, iron isn't the only ore you need to gather. Once you build an airship dock and your airship, you can collect copper ore from the island to the north. You'll need copper to unlock airship upgrades through the trader. Specifically, you need 32 pieces of copper to unlock the level two upgrade, so you need to either collect that much on your first trip to the island, or plan for multiple trips.

Beyond copper—after you have the level two airship—you can find quartz on the islands to the east and west. While quartz itself is useful, you need it to get silicon, which is produced by putting quartz in the furnace. You need silicon for the trader and for crafting, so it's a good idea to gather an abundance of quartz.

Finally, there's cobalt, which you can't reach until you upgrade your airship to level three. Looking at the map, you can't actually see the islands where cobalt is found without scrolling, as it's located on the islands that are far to the north and far to the south of your starting island.

While you'll find that the vending machine on the trader's station wants a piece of cobalt, you don't need to worry about it yet because you aren't going to unlock cobalt until later. Instead, focus on going through the trader's requests so you can get blueprints for new pieces of technology that help your base run with less work required from you, and so you can get the airship upgrades needed to eventually fly to distant islands in Solarpunk.

Released June 8, 2026

Developer(s) Cyberwave

Publisher(s) rokaplay, Metaroot

Multiplayer Online Co-Op

Number of Players Single-player