Once a dungeon is surveyed, when selecting a dungeon from the mountain screen you will see a new icon that looks like a pickaxe that will allow you to mine.
- Click on the dungeon that has the resource you want to mine.
- Click on the mining icon (pickaxe) on the top left.
- The next screen (Mine Dungeon) will ask you to select the dungeon where you want the goblin to come from, this is also where the resource will be stored once mining is completed.
- Select the resource you want to mine in the second panel down.
- Select the amount of the resource that you want to mine, this can be done by using the slider or typing in the amount in the box to the right.
- When you click launch, the goblins will leave on their expedition.
The first time shown is how long the goblins take to get there. This is also how long it will take to walk back. The time below that is how long it will spend mining. This depends solely on how many resources are being mined.
Note: Remote mines will mine at your base mining rate (so modified by technologies) but will not be affected by number of mining tiles or level of mine.
You can cancel mining expeditions from the "Info" tab that looks like a paper scroll. Go to the "Overworld Events" tab, then select the mining expedition you wish to cancel. Click cancel on the right and the goblins will stop mining and head home.
One goblin will only be able to carry up to it's carrying capacity in minerals (base 500). If you mine more minerals at once, more goblins will have to come, but this will not speed up mining operations! The extra goblins will simply sit around waiting till the first one is finished before it starts! Five goblins sent to one mine take five times as long to mine the same amount as it would take 5 goblins each sent to a seperate mine. Multiple mining expeditions in the same or different dungeons are allowed; however, a single resource node cannot be mined by multiple expeditions simultaneously. For example, if a remote dungeon has two Primordial Fire resource nodes then two expeditions can be sent to mine the nodes (one expedition for each node). You cannot send two or more expeditions from any combination of your dungeons to mine the same node.
Example: If you need 2000 of Resource "X" and it takes 1 goblin 20 hours to mine 500 of that resource, sending 4 goblins to one mine to pick up all 2000 will take 80 hours. But if you send 1 goblin each to 4 different dungeons, each collecting 500, they'll all be done in 20 hours. In fact, you could send those same 4 goblins out again once they got back, and in the same 80 hours you'd now have 8000 of the resource instead of just 2000.
Even if the resource is very rare and you can't find more than one location for it, you are better off sending 1 goblin out to mine their max carry limit, then sending them back out once they are done. You give up the travel time cost by doing this but you free up those other goblins to mine other locations.
Another tip is to send out your goblins to mine just enough resource so that they are back at your dungeon when you are ready to play again. Let's say you end your playing night at 10pm, and don't play again till 6pm. That's 20 hours that you are offline. Let's say you need 4000 of a certain resource, and that resource takes 25 hours to mine 500. Instead of sending out 8 goblins to mine 500 each for your 4000 and taking 25 hours, send out 10 goblins mining 400 to get your 4000, and this way they take only 19.2 hours. So now when you get home your goblins will be done or on their way back. Now you have your goblins available to ship items around, build rooms, survey dungeons, or mine in your home dungeons when you are online. You also will have the 4000 resources you needed ready to go when you log in. If you had sent the 8 goblins for 500 each, they wouldn't be back till after you normally log off.
Remote mining is also a good way to bring in extra resources when you have goblins sitting around doing nothing. If a dungeon of yours has 11 goblins, but you are only mining two things (gold + mithril for example) then you likely have three goblins sitting around doing nothing. So before logging off send them out to remote mine a little bit of some resource for the time you plan on being away. If you are going to be offline for 18 hours, those three goblins could be mining approximately 1500 Primordial Water instead of just sitting around doing nothing, or hitting a different dungeon that has mithril, or whatever you need.
Expert - Remote mining is also an excellent way to fine tune the rate of resource collection, most often in the case of Crystal and Iron, and perhaps Gold. Because Dungeon Overlord allocates your Goblins equally among all of your activated mines, you can use remote mining to slightly mine from one resource more.
For example, suppose you want to upgrade your Vault from level 2 to level 3. This costs you 2400 Iron and 800 Crystal, but if you mine from each equally, by the time you reach 800 Crystal you will only have 1143 Iron. One option is to then deactivate your Crystal tile. This could cause you to have more Goblins than can mine the single Iron tile. It also would require you to have to log in at the right times. Instead, you could choose at the beginning to send out one Goblin to remote mine Crystal.
If we are assuming you are at a 10% mining bonus at home without any other bonuses, and that you have 4 Goblins mining only Crystal and Iron, then you will get to 600 Iron in the following times:
Just mining 2 on each node: 18:11
Mining 2 per node, then maxing (3 Goblins mining, 1 idle) Iron once Crystal is done: 8:40 + 6:21 = 15:01
Mining 1.5 per node while sending 1 Goblin out to remote mine 500 Iron (including 10 mins travel time), then 2 per node once it returns: 8:30 + 8:01 = 16:31
In other words, you could have (effectively) 2.2 goblins per node (10% mining bonus) or you could have 1.65 on Crystal and 2.65 on Iron (approximately, discounting travel times).
I might not have picked the best example, as this method isn't the fastest, but at least the Goblins will get automatically switched for you.