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Since Village in the Shade is a farming sim, getting ore like copper, iron, and gold for tool upgrades is critical to becoming a more efficient farmer and dealing with certain rock and tree-related obstacles. However, you can’t immediately start mining for those items. Instead, you need to wait for the location to unlock and even for the general store to start selling certain items you need. But once you do gain access to the location and materials, getting better items doesn’t take too long at all.
Editor’s note: There will be no Village in the Shade spoilers below.
The anvil you need for tool upgrades in Village in the Shade is already on your farm when the game begins, but you need to wait for the Quarry to unlock on the seventh day of Spring, the recipe for the Blast Furnace to make ingots to be given to you shortly after, and the general store to start selling the copper, iron, or gold molds you need for each new version of a tool. Don’t worry about needing to forge the copper pickaxe upgrade yourself, as Kisuke will just give you one.
In terms of Quarry, getting copper, silver, and gold in Village in the Shade is pretty easy. So is finding semi-precious and precious stones. The copper can be found in rocks with amber-colored outcroppings, with big and small ones available. These show up right away. However, you’ll need to get to about 30 levels in before you start seeing the iron ore. That material shows up in rocks with silver-grey outcroppings. Once you get to around level 70 and beyond, you should start seeing gold ore. That, as you’d imagine, looks like gold outcroppings on grey rocks. The precious stones are available from floor 1 onward, with those being in grey rocks with clear-ish crystals coming out of them.
Here’s how all three of those kinds of rocks with copper ore, iron ore, gold ore, and precious stones look like when found in the Quarry in Village in the Shade. As another note, the rope to the next floor will never be found after breaking one of these kinds of rocks. Only the standard rocks with stone, coal, rock salt, clay, heavy stone, hard stone, and glass shard could reveal a rope to the next floor after being broken.
As for the Copper Mold, Iron Mold, Gold Mold, and even eventual Meteoric Iron Mold, those are sold at the Tagami General Store starting later in Spring of the first year in Village in the Shade. It costs 1,000 for the copper one, 3,000 for an iron one, 10,000 for a gold one, and 20,000 for a meteoric iron one. You tend to need one of these, the previous tier tool, and five ingots from the selected type of metal to create the upgraded tool at the anvil on your farm.
Village in the Shade is available on the Switch, Switch 2, PS5, and PC.
