Mining has always been a big part of the Story of Seasons franchise, and Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar is no different from that. To start, it will help you upgrade your tools, making you better equipped to expand your farm. This is not the only benefit, as the game, for the first time in several iterations, also allows for a significant influx of profit from gems, which can be found in a multitude of ways.
Your mining journey starts when Lloyd arrives at your farm during the tutorial and gives you the hatchet, a tool that combines the hammer and axe of previous games, though obviously, you will be limited in what you can break. Isaac will arrive at your house on a later date and request that you use the tool to help him gather materials to repair the red windmill on the farm, which will unlock the first tool upgrades you can get, which we have a full guide for as well. Then, the best use of time is to progress in the narrative by upgrading stalls and improving the Bazaar until you unlock the forest area that is close to the entrance of your farm.
Here is an area where you will find ore-containing rocks most consistently near the start of the game, before you start to really traverse the world in the weird new ways the game has included. As you upgrade your tools, the landscape of ore placement will shift slightly, but ore will have set spawnpoints throughout the world, with higher-grade ore or getting easier to locate spawn points the higher your tool rank is. After you clear ore, it will take a few in-game hours but that ore does spawn back into the same location, allowing you to return 2-3 times a day to try your hand at getting what you need.
Ore points can have very low spawn rates, with me personally having a dry spout of smashing maybe 6 silver rocks every day for 10 days before getting one silver ore, though upgrading the hatchet does improve these numbers ever so slightly. Higher ore points will have a chance to drop everything below their grade as well, which is beneficial since lots of good items like accessories use ore, and it is beneficial to focus on leveling the hatchet first, as it makes it easier to level up your other tools later.
After you receive the glider, which helps you glide across gaps, there are far more places you can mine than just the forest. The town has a pathway across the back of it, starting behind the inn, that you can traverse for an ore deposit or two, which can also be accessed via a barrel in town. Before you cross the bridge to the Bazaar, go right to a series of islands you can jump and glide across for two silver deposits near a barrel. If the wind is strong enough, bounce on the barrel and glide right as fast as you can to a platform leading to more ore. There is a chance ore can spawn right in front of the town or on your farm, though this is inconsistent. The chances jump up much higher if a hurricane happens the day before.
In addition, gems make a return with big price tags that you can use to make a big profit at the Bazaar, or to make accessories if you want to. They have a low chance of spawning as well, but there is a decent variety that you will probably get one every few days on the low end. Later on, since Iron is a very common drop, this can be a very beneficial material to sell, since you are almost guaranteed to get it back, even on ore you get a gem or the actual material you wanted. Copper, too, can become very common as you upgrade your hatchet, with it being the ore I got from the gold deposit very consistently.
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