Power-Mining, often compounded to Powermining, is the act of mining just for experience, dropping the ore. Players often powermine copper at the start of the game, or sell it to Zack's Mining Company, because the ore is useless on its own. Once they can mine tin ore, they can start to smith. Powermining then becomes useless, other than a cheap and fast way to gain exp. The opposite, smithing without mining, means buying ore from other players or getting it from barbarians. It is currently otherwise impossible to gain half as much smithing exp as mining exp. In the past, it was impossible to gain a third.