Yep a lot of the time if you mine just the surface, you will get a bit then it shows dirt so you stop. Virtually all of the Copper deposits extend way down into the ground, you can dig down and then in to make a nice little shelter for the night as well. Same technique is good for the Silver up in the mountains as well.

im new... whats the point of this ? takes half the time to just mine the node then to dig around it does ?

Originally posted by Karabeep:

im new... whats the point of this ? takes half the time to just mine the node then to dig around it does ?

Most of the time a majority of the copper node is underground. Only so much is at the surface. If all u mine is what's at the surface ur missing alot of copper ore

https://steamcommunity.com/app/892970/discussions/0/3589960830787283643/

Quoting myself 🤪:

Originally posted by Greggho:

you have to dig around and under the node for quite a bit - there are "bounding boxes" that don't necessarily touch the ore node itself, nor are that close to the node sometimes (each box is like larger than a square meter or so?)

after the node is floating freely in all 3 dimensions you have to whack it some more until it breaks - if you freed it from all bounding boxes proper, then the ENTIRE node just bust a nut, lol, super satisfying. if you failed and just a piece of it breaks then well, dig some more around

this mod shows said boxes - the pic in the description gives you an idea of what goes on in the game engine...

https://www.nexusmods.com/valheim/mods/1525

There was, maybe still is, a mod that shows the box. I tried it a couple times, it seems to me that most times the box extended further into the sides of the pit than you would think. So dig wider...

It's not just nothing touching it, but nothing touching any of it's bounding boxes (each chunk has its own bounding box) nor the whole-ore bounding box. In both cases, the box is quite large compared to what it represents. In some cases, you won't be able to explode it because the bounding box extends deeper than bedrock level and crossing the terrain map counts as "touching something".

You need to have a clear area underneath of your height plus Pickaxe, if you have any spikes of ground it will stop it. As said above you have to hit it at least once after area is clear.
Did it yesterday on the Mistlands PTB.

Something must be weird... I have done almost two heights of myself under and very big empty space on sides, and tried to mine a chunk but it never exploded :/

It has to have nothing touching it, then once you break a piece the whole thing should collapse (was working with Silver as of last week).