Mining stones with a pickaxe

[pillock 850]

Basically: how?

 

I recently started playing DayZ again after a couple of months off, to try out some of the new survival features. I managed to dig up worms by equipping the shovel, looking at the ground and middle-mousing (tip: don't eat the worms!) but this technique doesn't appear to work with the pickaxe when I tried to break some stones off a big rock.

 

Am I being thick? How do you get stones using the pickaxe?

[n1kko 326]

First off, congrats on post #500.


Back on topic:  It should work the same.  Look at a rock and either middle mouse click or use the scroll wheel.  

[Warhoax 63]

I've heard that you need to be in first person to do it, cannot remember if I actually did that when I was ig.

[zyryx 14]

Can you re-use stones after using them in a campfire?

[darthbane67 92]

Make sure you raised the pickaxe with the spacebar one time trying to chop a tree it wasn't working then I tried raising my axe boom no tree.

[pillock 850]

Thanks for the responses, but I still can't get the feckin thing to work.

 

I've tried 1st person

I've tried 3rd person

I've tried raising the axe

I've tried lowering the axe

I've tried crouching

I've tried standing

I've tried being on top of the rock

I've tried being next to the rock

I've tried every combination of the above

I've even tried using LMB and just bashing the rock repeatedly as if it were a no-panted fresh spawn in Berezino

 

I am doing something wrong, but I'm buggered if I know what. Maybe it's the wrong type of rock?

[barnabus 1708]

Unlike wood and trees I don't think you mine off of just any rock you find.  I believe it has to be one of the smaller rocks in the fields and by the roads.

[Poindexter 11]

That has happened to me, could not mine the rock that I was looking at, so I left it alone and tried another rock with another pickaxe in another part of the map and that worked fine! Also I have since found out that those sort of mossy rock areas you find in fields can yield rocks (though haven't tried it yet)

[King Raptor 191]

We mined stone from man-sized rock we picked at random at first try, worked immediately. Didn't bother trying it afterwards.

I think it was done from first person view.

[Kaboki 62]

I hope they make so that rocks can be found anywhere without a pickaxe. Im an outdooorsman and have made thousands of campfires in real life, but I have never ever needed a pickaxe too find small rocks ^_^ . Carrying a pickaxe and an axe makes room for not much else in the backpack and I think it's ridiciolous to have too have booth to make fires that you can cook on.

[pillock 850]

Right! I've done it, finally.

 

What I've concluded is this:

 

It doesn't matter if you're in first-person view or not and you don't need your axe raised; you just need to be in the right place relative to your boulder, and this appears to be somewhat random. I tried several different rocks, and only found one that would cooperate out of about 5 - and even with that one, I could only get the middle-mouse action to appear on one particular side of the rock. Probably the system doesn't work properly yet; but it could be that they've deliberately designed it to be awkward for some unfathomable reason. Anyway, persistence pays off.