How to Get Copper in Solarpunk
The first tedious island farm.
Copper is one of the most needed minerals to craft all your cool electric tools in Solarpunk. You are going to need a lot of them, and here’s where you can find the Copper Ores and how to smelt them into Copper Bars.
Where to Get Copper Ores in Solarpunk
To get Copper Ores, you’ll need to fly to the small island north of your base, as seen in the image above. You must have a Dock already so you can use the Airship to fly here. You don’t even need to unlock the map yet since the island is easily visible when you go to the edge of your starting island.
Take the Airship and fly here. You’ll find three Watermelon spawns and a Copper Ore node. Bring a Pickaxe and a few Stones and Wood (Sticks) so you can recraft several Pickaxes until you get enough Copper Ores.
There are a few big chunks of Copper Ore, which should give you several Copper Ore initially. However, you’ll want to mine the Copper Ore node (the ground) to get a lot more, which should take three swings to get one Copper Ore. That’ll break a couple of Pickaxes just to get a stack of Copper Ores, so you should bring a lot of Stones and Wood (Sticks) to craft more of these. Luckily, there are some Stones, Sticks, and trees around the island as well. As long as you don’t break your Pickaxe while having no Stones available, you should be able to replenish your tools with the resources available on the island.
How to Get Copper Bars in Solarpunk
To get Copper Bars (only called Copper in the game), you need to research the Furnace and use it to smelt the Copper Ores. At this point in the game, the Furnace research should already be unlocked since it is a tier 2 research upgrade and the Dock (Airship) is at tier 3, so you don’t even get a chance to get a Copper Ore without finding the Furnace upgrade. Also, you already have a Furnace up and running since you already made one to craft those Iron Bars as well.
Just place the Copper Ores inside the Furnace and add some fuel, preferably just Wood. You can use Wax Briquettes, which are more efficient for fuel. However, Bricks are needed for these, which might be harder to farm than Iron in the long run.
Smelt the Copper Ores and just wait until it finishes. You can smelt a total of 16 Copper Ores at a time, so you can make multiple Furnaces to make the process much faster.
In the future, you’ll unlock the Drill, where you can automate mining as long as you have some power.
