Journey to the Center

Clearing:

Tiling:

At this point you should be ready to advance downward and seriously get into mining. You should have your torches prepared, your miners ready, and some sort of defensive military force, even if it is only a handful of naked gnomes with stone weapons and wooden shields. It will also be greatly to your benefit to have many builders available to quickly place down torches as you mine. Once you feel ready, open up the next level by mining stairs down all the way to -10. Make sure you leave space to place one torch in your staircase for each level so that no enemies may spawn in the one place that can be easily overlooked.Once you are at -10, make a 9x9 or similar square room around your staircase as a base of operations for your miners. Here you can easily place guard posts, traps, stone stockpiles, and bandages in easy reach for your miners and all that may find themselves underground. Also mine out nodes for where you will mine out from and put doors down as a last resort buffer to give escaping gnomes something to help hold off enemies. And most important,As you are now low enough for monsters to spawn if you do not remember to do this quickly enough you may find your safe room is not so safe.Next you have a choice to make. In my experience there are only two good ways to mine:and. Here I will show you how to properly do each one and the reasons you might have for doing one over the other.Clearing is a simple method of mining that you may have already stumbled upon yourself. It involves clearing out 'rooms' one after the other so that you can attack a layer of stone chunk by chunk and be sure to not only grab all the ore within the room but to give yourself an easy way to place down torches and be sure that every bit of it is lit up. Simply tell your miners to clear a room of an odd dimension and then place a torch in the center. I recommend 9x9 or 11x11 squares, but go no larger than 13x13 as your torches will not reach to whole room. Then section off more rooms to be cleared next to that one leaving connecting passageways between each one and repeat. You are essentially just copying the exact same room you mined out where your stairs down to the level is. The reasons you might want to use this method are because it is simple, uses as few torches as possible, gives you access to large amounts of stone, can be used effectively to level up mining skills, and allows you to easily re-purpose cleared space for actual rooms, workshops, or stockpiles.The amount of time it takes to mine out an entire level is absurd, as is the time it takes for your gnomes to stockpile all the resources you dig up in the process. This leaves you open to deal with a great number of golems that, while are not serious threats on their own, can corner defenseless gnomes and kill or seriously injure them while your defense force tries to make their way to them without being cutoff by other golems. Keep in mind however that golems have a rare chance to drop Cores that can be used to make Automatons, so you arguably want to use this method over tiling when you are looking to farm them.Then there is Tiling. This method is similar to clearing, but is functionally the inverse. Instead of clearing out rooms, you leave the chunks there and instead mine out what would have been the walls; You simply mine out a grid of hallways so that only chunks of rock and ore are left. The aim here is to have each chunk of rock be as similar to the next chunk as possible so that you have an orderly pattern, but it does leave room for error. Try to leave the chunks or 'pillars' as close to 9x9's as possible, and then simply place a torch down at every intersection of hall or every corner of each pillar. This method allows for you to, as the veins will almost never be small enough to not have any bit of them exposed on the side of a pillar chunk. When you see ore exposed, simply mine from the corner of a chunk to where you think the ore is likely contained. If you have waited for your torches to already have been placed, then you will be happy to find that you need not place any additional torches as the corner torches are more than enough to cover any removed sections of pillar they are next to. Tiling is the fastest form of mining an entire layer as the amount you must mine to cover the entire floor is the inverse of Clearing. As such, as little stone as possible is exposed, leaving far less to clean up and making it much more difficult for golems of any number to spawn. The downsides are that a few more torches are used and you have far less stone available to you. It also requires a bit of spacial reasoning from you if you want to have exactly proportional and congruent chunks. But because there is some margin for error, this is not such a problem. Simply try to get a good row or section of them mined out and then when you are ready to mine out another section just start mining from where a hall already existed.You may find that you have exposed a vein of ore on the walls that are not within the section you just mined out; in this case I would recommend holding off until you are finished with the previous section to mine it out. The reason for this is that you may make it overly difficult to continue your pattern in the future as well as you may need to put torches in awkward positions just to make sure it is lit up in the meantime.