Ores, Bars & the Pickaxe Ladder

No ore in Dragonwilds is locked behind a Mining level. What gates you is the pickaxe in your hand and whether you can survive the region the node is in. That is the single most important thing to know coming from the MMO, where mining Runite means training Mining to 85, and it is why a level 3 character with a borrowed pickaxe can be standing on adamantite.

Two places confirm it. The official wiki's Mining resource tables carry a required-pickaxe column and no level column at all, and the Artisan level-up table, which is where smelting unlocks would live, lists only passives: Bark To Bones at 11, Superheat at 20, Overdrive at 48. Not one bar appears on it.

Every ore, and what it needs

Regions are given twice: the sub-area the wiki names, then the region page here that contains it.

Read the first two rows again, because they catch people out: copper and tin are not in your starting region. Brynmoor has stone, clay and rune essence and no metal ore whatsoever, so the whole bronze stage of the game happens after you have pushed north into Ghornfell, a power level 3 area patrolled by hostile Garou. That is the real difficulty spike in early Dragonwilds, and it arrives before your first bronze bar rather than after it.

Blurite is the one ore you cannot find in the open world. It exists only inside the Takla Kara vault, which makes it the one metal on a fixed supply per run rather than a renewable node you can farm.

The other things you mine

Coal is the bottleneck nobody plans for. Every bar from steel upward wants three coal per bar, and coal is only in Fellhollow, the region the wiki rates Extreme and the one that turns this game into a horror game. You will be making return trips there for the rest of the run, so build a lodestone route rather than carrying it home by hand.

Bar recipes

The pattern is clean enough to hold in your head: three ore makes one bar, and everything from steel up adds three coal. Rune is the only exception, swapping coal for luminite, which is why it is the one bar you cannot make until you have reached the endgame region.

Steel has a second recipe, 1 iron bar plus 3 coal for 10 XP, which is worth knowing only if you have already smelted iron bars you no longer want.

A caution on sourcing: the Blast Furnace page's recipe table renders its product and input columns ambiguously, and reading it literally produces a "Silver Bar" made from runite and luminite. That is a table-layout artifact, not a recipe. The rune line above is taken from the Rune Bar page itself, which gives 3 runite plus 3 luminite in a Blast Furnace for 20 XP. The salvage-pile and metal-leaf rows on that same table are left out here for the same reason, since they could not be read unambiguously.

Unverified

The Rune Bar page states an Artisan requirement of 20 alongside its 20 XP reward, and the identical number on both is suspicious. The Adamant Bar page lists XP and no requirement, and the Artisan level-up table lists no bar at all, so no level requirements are given above. Treat bar access as gated by station and ore rather than by skill until a primary source says otherwise.