Is there a more efficient way to mine rock?

[Ninjapilot10]

Question in the title, is there? I've been working on building a keep in game but the amount of rock i need comes out to about 1250 for 2500ish ashlar blocks, i'm about half way through mining out the required stone (RIP like 4 iron picks) and I figured I'd hop on to ask if there's any better way to mine out bulk amounts of rock on vanilla.

[LadyWYT]

Rocks for stone bricks, or small rocks for cobblestone/drystone? The best way is typically to mine out a strip of stone 2 wide and 2 tall, then mine a checkerboard pattern into it, alternating top and bottom. Once you're done with that, mine out the top and bottom blocks to get full blocks of stone to drop from the checkerboard strip--you should be able to mine out one block on top/bottom and then mine three blocks around it to get three stone blocks to drop.

This method should net you a good amount of both full stone blocks and little stones to work with. It's still a lot of work, but it's a fairly efficient process.

[Ninjapilot10]

18 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Rocks for stone bricks, or small rocks for cobblestone/drystone? The best way is typically to mine out a strip of stone 2 wide and 2 tall, then mine a checkerboard pattern into it, alternating top and bottom. Once you're done with that, mine out the top and bottom blocks to get full blocks of stone to drop from the checkerboard strip--you should be able to mine out one block on top/bottom and then mine three blocks around it to get three stone blocks to drop.

This method should net you a good amount of both full stone blocks and little stones to work with. It's still a lot of work, but it's a fairly efficient process.

full stone blocks, I'll try out this method. I've been slowly losing my will to live just mining all the stone I've gotten so far.

[LadyWYT]

20 minutes ago, Ninjapilot10 said:

full stone blocks, I'll try out this method. I've been slowly losing my will to live just mining all the stone I've gotten so far.

Goodness, that's a lot! In any case, you should have better luck with the method I described. However, if you're not opposed to using mods, you might try out this one to make collecting stone even easier: https://mods.vintagestory.at/stoneharvesting

[Vratislav]

I think Stone Quarry mod is also a good candidate to help. 
https://mods.vintagestory.at/stonequarry

[cjc813]

It's very much not vanilla, but imo it should be.

The stone quarry mod is at least worth a look. Makes things way faster, but it doesn't feel trivial, and the mechanics are neat.

I'm a pretty big vanilla purist, but I don't play without quarry mod.